As new American competitors such as Paramount+ and HBO Max prepare to launch their services in South Korea later this year, competition in the local streaming service market is expected to heat up.
Paramount+, the subscription-based video streaming service from Paramount Global, will launch in South Korea next month in collaboration with Tving, a local online video-on-demand platform managed by CJ ENM.
Tving subscribers will be able to watch original and library content from Paramount Pictures and CBS, such as the “Star Trek” series, starting next month.
Following Netflix, Disney+, the content streaming service from Walt Disney Co., and Apple TV+, the subscription-based streaming service from tech behemoth Apple, Paramount+ will be the fourth global streaming service provider operating in South Korea.
HBO Max, owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, is slated to start its Korean service later this year.
The company hasn’t said when its Korean operation would start, but it has begun production on “Beyond The Wardrobe,” a Brazilian film about a K-pop boy band.
The movie, scheduled to be released in the first half of next year, features a teenage girl in Sao Paulo, Brazil, who finds a portal in a closet and meets a K-pop idol in Seoul through it.
Experts noted that the recent move of global media giants is attributable to the rising reputation of South Korea as a content hub in the populous Asian region for its globally popular cultural content like K-pop, TV series and films.
“In the global market, Korean creators have well proven their ability to produce quality content,” said culture critic Jeong Deok-hyeon. “The global streamers enter the South Korean market in a way to cooperate with Korean productions.”
Also, the two latecomers of Paramount+ and HBO Max are expected to attract local clients from industry leaders, including Netflix, and fuel the fierce competition in the saturated market.
The Korean market has been dominated by Netflix, which made its Korean debut in 2015 and has produced many big-budget Korean-language originals, including the global sensation “Squid Game” (2021).
Both Disney+ and Apple TV+ started Korean services last year and provided a handful of Korean-language originals but struggled to make a strong presence in the country.
According to industry data, Netflix had a leading 8.4 million monthly active users as of March, followed by 3.4 million for Wavve, a homegrown streaming platform run by major broadcasters KBS, MBC and SBS, and 2.6 million for Tving. Disney+ placed fifth with 1.1 million users.