A few months ago, a scene from a movie featuring a wild three-minute orgy went viral on Reddit. While such things being posted to Reddit is unremarkable, there were a few interesting things about this particular clip.
First, the scene was not from a porno but from a Filipino feature film titled Alapaap, which premiered exclusively on Vivamax, which claims to be the number one streaming service in the conservative Catholic country.
The second thing is that the orgy scene was so graphic that, even though it ostensibly only features simulated sex, it looked convincing enough that Redditors posted it under r/extramile – a subreddit featuring actors engaging in real sex scenes for non-pornographic films.
And Alapaap is not just a risqué outlier among Vivamax’s offerings – it is just one among the streaming site’s many extremely steamy movies, which appears to be the engine of its rapid growth.
Netflix doesn’t release the number of subscribers to its service by country, but Flixpatrol, a website focused on streaming service analytics, estimates that Netflix has around 400,000 subscribers in the Philippines. By comparison, Vivamax has nearly 6 million subscribers, according to its most recently released data.
But then Vivamax’s reach goes well beyond the Philippines. It’s available in 41 areas across the globe and members of the country’s huge diaspora make up most of their subscriber base. By the company’s own admission, more than half of its subscribers are male.
Beyond the numbers, Vivamax has had a palpable cultural impact. It has turned many previously unknown actresses such as Angeli Khang and AJ Raval, whom the company refers to as their “Vivamax queens,” into social media celebrities with massive followings.
What is Vivamax?
Vivamax was not founded by some rogue company that found breakaway online success. The streaming platform is owned and operated by Viva Communications, one of the largest media and entertainment companies in the Philippines.
Viva owns numerous subsidiaries in film, television, music, and publishing. Its talent agency arm manages several Filipino superstars such as actress Anne Curtis, pop star Sarah Geronimo, and entertainer Vice Ganda, all household names in their own right and each with millions of social media followers.
Viva’s racy foray into the streaming market with Vivamax is just another feather in the cap of this conglomerate. Launched amid the height of the pandemic, when people were forced to remain at home and malls and cinemas were closed, Viva took its library of 3,000 hours worth of films and uploaded to the platform, while gradually adding new content that had been completed before or during the lockdown.
Then came the erotic films that quickly built the service’s reputation for steamy content.
It’s a reputation that Viva tries to downplay in the media. Viva COO Vincent del Rosario said, “It’s a misconception that VM’s content is mostly sexy films. We also have many wholesome movies. Our adult content is the differentiator. It’s edgier than the sexy scenes in TV shows.”
Viva also claims that, while their edgier films garner more social buzz and are usually the most talked about, sexy content makes up only 10 percent of their entire library, which contains old blockbusters from its archive, as well as Korean movies. It has also split the platform into two sections – Viva Prime, which houses its wholesome and family-friendly fare while Vivamax contains all of the bolder and more risqué content.
Still, it’s pretty clear what most of the subscribers are there for. Since signing up for the service, the top 10 most-watched films shown on the platform’s interface have always been from Vivamax’s risqué offerings.
Because of Vivamax’s rather unconventional path to breakout fame, other streaming platforms have followed suit, though arguably none have replicated Viva’s success.
One such company, AQ Prime, was summoned by the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) for an “unauthorized showing” of its controversial film, Mang Kanor, based on the real-life sex videos of an older man with a younger woman that went viral in 2018, in a cinema. The movie is available on the company’s streaming service of the same name.
Another fact that could also explain Vivamax’s swift success is its affordability. At PHP149 (US$2.70) per month, Vivamax’s saucy offerings are more accessible to the average Filipino viewer. One gets access to an ad-free platform and streaming on five connected devices, with two downloads a week (easing bandwidth issues one can get with streaming), TV content casting, and three free extra days. Compare this to Netflix’s cheapest subscription package at PHP149, which only allows streaming on 1 mobile or tablet device at a time.
The Overseas Filipino Appeal
One noteworthy contingent of Vivamax’s viewership is the overseas Filipino community, who reportedly make up a majority of the streaming service’s subscriber base. According to Viva, many of these subscribers come from the United States — which makes sense as the largest concentration of the Filipino diaspora is in the US, many of whom may have grown up with Viva’s wealth of films and TV shows, which long predate Vivamax.
Interestingly, Vivamax has created dedicated social media pages for Middle East & Europe, as well as Japan. The Middle East is home to the majority of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), with 83.6 percent working in countries such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Kuwait. Meanwhile, Filipinos in Japan, many of whom work in entertainment, engineering, agriculture, construction, services, and manual labor, make up the fourth largest foreign community.
One can only speculate as to the platform’s decision to zero in on these audience segments but with heterosexual themes dominating Vivamax’s racy content, there appears to be a deliberate attempt to target the male overseas contingent looking for post-work entertainment to blow off steam. And when you add into the mix having to work and live within strict conservative cultures such as those in the Middle East, where any form of pornography is outright illegal, spicy showings from the motherland hold extra appeal.
The Catholic Conundrum
Like many Asian countries, the Philippines is at the crux of a cultural shift between changing attitudes towards sex and its deeply ingrained, conservative religious culture. In the majority-Catholic nation, the official view on sex is that it should only be between a man and a woman, who are married to each other – something that is taken so seriously that divorce is still illegal.
Yet one can argue that it’s precisely this patriarchal view on sexuality that has opened the door for the acceptance of platforms such as Vivamax. While a handful of movies that touch on same-sex relationships such as May-December-January (which features a mother, a son, and his best friend in a bizarre love triangle) have premiered on Vivamax, most of its erotic content still serves the male gaze.
Then there’s the ambiguity of being a digitally exclusive platform. The MTRCB, the Philippines’ agency tasked with regulating and prescribing ratings for films and TV shows, only explicitly has jurisdiction over content distributed through television and cinemas. Whether the body should be allowed to regulate streaming services such as Vivamax and Netflix remains a hotly debated issue.
That said, Vivamax is apparently keenly considering the threat of further regulation. The company entered a memorandum of agreement with MTRCB last year to “promote responsible viewing.” One way it does that is by requiring subscribers to input a PIN before watching films tagged as “sexy,” or other adjectives such as “violent,” to enforce age-appropriate viewing.
Vivamax and its softcore porn offerings also sit squarely in the gray area of the legality of porn and adult content in the Philippines. Besides child pornography, the Philippines does not have any explicit laws banning the viewing or consumption of porn. However, Article 201 of the Revised Penal Code does penalize “immoral doctrines, obscene publications and exhibitions and indecent shows,” further specifying them as “Those who, in theaters, fairs, cinematographs or any other place, exhibit, indecent or immoral plays, scenes, acts or shows, whether live or in film, which are prescribed by virtue hereof, shall include those which… serve no other purpose but to satisfy the market for violence, lust or pornography.” Violators may be arrested between six months to a year or pay a fine of PHP6,000 to PHP12,000 (US$108.92 to US$217.84).
In 2017, former President Rodrigo Duterte’s government ordered that the country’s ISPs block all major pornography sites under the auspices of the country’s anti-child pornography laws, but clearly not much effort was put into enforcing it (in 2021, the Philippines topped a ranking of countries that spent the longest average amount of time watching Pornhub).
The result of this legal ambiguity is that, while adult content produced overseas is easily accessible, there is no legitimate pornography industry within the Philippines. So the only way to legally access homegrown adult content from the Philippines is through softcore streaming purveyors such as Vivamax.
New Media, Old Playbook
While Vivamax’s playbook is, in some ways, disrupting the Philippine entertainment landscape, let’s not forget that this is still just one subsidiary of a powerful Filipino media conglomerate that has long held a stronghold on the country’s showbiz industry.
In some ways, Vivamax’s strategy is similar to the playbook American premium cable channels such as HBO employed in their early days, leaning heavily on their ability to feature more explicit sexual content than conventional TV channels in order to grow their subscriber base. Shows like Real Sex essentially paid for HBO’s more critically acclaimed but lesser-watched shows and documentaries. Today, those lines have been further blurred, with the American company being known (and earning a fair share of criticism) for including gratuitous sexual content even in their prestige shows like Game of Thrones.
And just like HBO, even Vivamax is starting to blur the lines between the prestigious and provocative. One of its films, Silip Sa Apoy, was written by National Artist for Film Ricky Lee, and features Angeli Khang doing some steamy scenes alongside co-star Sid Lucero, an established actor himself. The film’s director, Mac Alejandre, won the Best Director award at the 4th Wallachia International Film Festival in Romania.
But it’s unclear whether Vivamax will continue to lean heavily on erotica to grow its subscriber base or whether it will use its momentum to transition into more artistically ambitious fare. At any rate, its success in an increasingly crowded streaming market suggests that even the likes of Netflix may face fierce competition from regional services that know how to give local audiences exactly what they want.
