Before the entry of Netflix, three terrestrial broadcasters established a joint venture called Content Alliance Platform and introduced a streaming service called POOQ in 2012. Meanwhile, SK Telecom launched its own streaming service Oksusu in 2016. Based on the agreement between terrestrial broadcasters and SK Telecom, POOQ, and Oksusu merged into Wavve.

Until 2011, the nation’s public authorities restricted pay television networks to produce news programs except for two news channels Yonhap Television News (YTN) and Maeil Broadcasting Network (MBN). However, following the amendment of the nation’s Broadcasting Act and other broadcasting regulations in 2009, the Korean government allowed major newspaper companies to launch generalist pay television networks in which programming would consist of all genres, including television news, drama, entertainment programs and documentaries in 2011.

The entry of generalist pay-television networks in 2011 unleashed competitions between broadcasters. In the meantime, CJ E&M (currently CJ ENM), a major media conglomerate that owned several pay-television networks, bought On-media, another pay-television conglomerate owned by Orion, in 2010. The merger and acquisition of Onmade CJ as the market-dominant enterprise in the cable television industry.

The conglomerate’s financial strength and dominance in the broadcasting market attracted many creators to its pay television networks.

It is worth noting that a handful of Chinese SVoD platforms, including iQiyi and Tencent Video, had been major investors in Korean television production before the entry of Netflix.

For instance, iQiyi, a streaming platform owned by the Chinese search engine Baidu, paid 1.5 million CNY (about 0.23 million USD) per episode to Next entertainment World (NEW), a Korean media production company, for the distribution rights of NEW’s television melo drama Descendants of the Sun (2016) in China. The contract with iQiyi was vital for NEW to recoup the production cost of the series (about 13 billion KRW, equivalent to 11.4 million USD) (Ko, 2016). Although the leverage of Chinese SVoD platforms waned in the aftermath of the Chinese authority’s unofficial sanction against Korean cultural imports in 2017, they
recently began to increase investment in Korean television. For instance, iQiyi invested more than 20 billion KRW (17.7 million USD) in a mystery series, Cliffhanger (2021), for exclusive distribution rights worldwide except the Korean market. Also, Tencent invested 100 billion KRW (88.3 million USD) in JTBC Studio, the main production subsidiary of JTBC, in 2021 (Choi, 2021).

Streaming television series and films produced and distributed on Netflix and other streaming platforms are exempted from the rating systems managed by the Korean Communications Standards Commission (Television) and the Korea Media Rating Board (motion pictures).

Despite controversies over reverse discrimination against existing media companies, there have been few discussions about how to regulate SVoDs in the nation’s legislature (Kang, 2019).

Before 2019, terrestrial broadcasters exported a series of television dramas – including The Inheritors (also known as The Heirs, 2013, broadcast by SBS). That Winter, the Wind Blows (2013, broadcast by SBS), and President (2010–2011, broadcast by KBS) to Netflix that had been already on air previously. However, the release of these television series on Netflix was far from co-production or the broadcaster’s efforts of recouping the production costs because both the production and distribution of those series and the reimbursement had been completed. Furthermore, roadcasters only sold the broadcasting right of archives to Netflix before it entered the Korean market (Lim, 2021).

Apart from the Korean Broadcasting System, the nation’s public broadcaster, the Korean government is the majority shareholder of MBC. Also, as the company’s largest stakeholder
(11.68% owned by the National Pension Service), it continues exerting a strong influence on the business activities of KT, which had been a state-owned enterprise before its privatization in 2002. In addition to this, the Korea Teachers’ Credit Union, the nation’s second-largest public fund, invested 100 billion KRW (about 88 million USD) in 2019 (Cho, 2019).

（譯自：Cultural politics of Netflix in local contexts: A case of the Korean media industries by Taeyoung Kim, Simon Fraser University, Canada；金太永《于在地語境中的 Netflix 文化政治：以韓國媒體產業為例》，2022 年，刊於 Media, Culture & Society）