South Korea Emerging as Asian Venue of OTT Competition

SK Telecom president Park Jeong-ho proposed an Asian over-the-top (OTT) alliance at the Culture Innovation Forum held in Busan on Nov. 25 in conjunction with the South Korea-ASEAN special summit.

At present, the Wavve OTT service launched by SK Telecom and South Korea’s three major terrestrial broadcasting stations is targeting Asia as its first overseas market. According to the president of SK Telecom, however, Wavve alone is insufficient to overcome the massive capital of Netflix and a scale of economy based on the alliance can be a starting point of competition with Netflix. “We will turn Wavve of South Korea into Wavve of Asia in order to set up a platform on which all Asian countries collaborate,” he said, adding, “The 250 or so divided OTT media services in Asia can create global content representing Asian values only when they unite.”

These days, Netflix is increasing its contents targeting Asian markets, trying to penetrate the markets based on Hallyu by working with South Korean content providers in particular. In this regard, Netflix formed strategic partnerships with CJ ENM and Studio Dragon to create original contents with them from 2020 to 2022. In addition, Studio Dragon’s contents that CJ ENM distributes are scheduled to be serviced worldwide via Netflix.

Also, Netflix is going to stream JTBC’s prime time dramas in more than 190 countries from 2020 based on its partnership with JTBC Content Hub. CJ ENM and JTBC are not members of Wavve as of now.