Ian McKee of EMA Asia
EMA Partners on Its First International Arm, EMA Asia
January 9, 2018
LAS VEGAS — The Entertainment Merchants Association Jan. 9 announced a partnership with Singapore-based Vuulr to establish its first international arm: EMA Asia.
The agreement covers China, India, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia.
EMA Asia will advance the EMA’s digital supply chain efficiency initiatives in Asia through conferences, seminars and workshops that will create awareness and promote adoption of the EMA’s standards, specifications and best practices for online video, according to the EMA.
Vuulr, which provides digital transaction solutions, will operate EMA Asia from its offices in Singapore under an exclusive multi-year license from EMA.
“We’ve unintentionally pigeonholed ourselves domestically,” said Mark Fisher, president and CEO of the EMA. “We’ve created EMA Asia in part to support those of you here in the U.S. who have partners internationally. Our goal is to expand adoption of the EMA standards and to get feedback on how they can be improved. We believe we picked the right team to work with.”
Ian McKee, CEO of Vuulr, noted, “This is an industry that has a huge amount of disruption coming to its doorstep every day. There’s a huge amount of inefficiency.”
He added that the Vuulr office is well located to address Asia.
“Within a short flight of about five hours, we can be anywhere in the market,” he said, adding EMA Asia aims to help EMA members find out about some of the different challenges in those markets.
Increasing global utilization of the EMA’s standards, specifications and best practices for online video will open more markets to a greater diversity of content and allow more content to get online, more quickly and at a lower cost, benefitting content providers, retailers and consumers, according to the EMA. EMA’s digital supply chain standards, specifications, and best practices are developed to reduce friction points in the supply chain identified by digital video retailers and video programming distributors, the organization noted.
Members of EMA Asia will receive certain EMA member benefits and member rates for EMA conferences and events. As part of the agreement, Vuulr will also become a sponsor of Digital EMA, the EMA’s community for the online video industry, and participate in the EMA’s digital supply chain workgroup.