CNN of the United States chose Korean media content as the main background for the growth of Netflix’s Asian market.
On the 4th, CNN Business emphasized that “Korean content, including Netflix Korea’s original kingdom, is also successful overseas.” “Last year, Korean content’s viewership in Asia has increased four times compared to the previous year.”
(Photo = Netflix)
Netflix then announced that it has invested about $2 billion (about 2.2 trillion won) in Asian content from 2018 to last year. He also mentioned plans to double its investment in Asia, including Korea, Japan, and India.
Min-young Kim, VP of content for Netflix Korea, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, who appeared on CNN said, “I was aware that local content is an important factor in business growth in Asia.” I am enjoying it.”
Korean content, pinball effect continues
Experts predicted that the’pinball effect’, in which various factors simultaneously and simultaneously, will continue in the Korean content production environment. In addition to the global box office and investment of Korean content through the Global Internet Video Service (OTT), factors such as the growth of Korean webtoons and the increase in demand for indoor entertainment due to Corona 19 will be analyzed.
The most obvious economic growth through the pinball effect is in the production industry. Studio Dragon, a domestic drama production company, saw a 15% increase in stock price last December alone. The background of this rise is the success of Netflix’s Korean original’Sweet Home’.
Seungho in the movie. (Photo = Netflix)
‘Sweet Home’, produced by Studio Dragon, was watched by 22 million paid subscribers around the world for four weeks after its release in December of last year, and was mentioned as a success story of Netflix’s fourth quarter earnings announcement. Thanks to the global success of Korean content, Studio Dragon also recorded 86.3 billion won in sales in the fourth quarter of last year, up 101.6% year-on-year.
The economic ripple effect extends to small and medium-sized manufacturers. According to Market Point on the 26th of last month, the average share price increase rate of content producers such as Wiziwick Studio, Keyeast, NEW, Dexter, and Astory recorded 33%.
In particular, Wiziwick Studio, which participated in the production of the Netflix movie’Seungri-ho’, recently won an order for the Chinese blockbuster disaster movie Visual Special Effects (VFX) based on its own technology. Regarding the effect of falling water on small and medium-sized content producers, a researcher at a domestic securities company predicted that “if the Han-Ryeong was lifted, the stock prices of the Korean media and content businesses would rise further.
Rediscovering IP, increasing synergy
Content synergy effects are also expanding as the box office of visualized intellectual property rights (IP) increases the desire to consume the original work. On the 28th of last month, Naver CEO Han Sung-sook said, “After the sweet home aired, the number of global visitors to Naver webtoon increased,” and “we could observe that it leads to consumption of various contents.”
Thanks to the success of webtoons, Naver recently invested about $600 million (about 6615 billion won) to acquire the world’s largest web novel platform’Wattpad’. It is a strategy to continue the’second sweet home myth’ in not only webtoon but also web fiction.
(Photo = Naver Webtoon, Kakao Page)
Conversely, there are cases in which requests for video production for Korean webtoons are flooded from abroad, creating economic effects. On the online petition site in the US, a petition to “make a level-up animation for Korean webtoons alone” received a total of 179,000 consents as of the 31st of last month. This webtoon is receiving hot reactions not only in the US, but also in Japan and Europe. DMC Media, a domestic content company, is promoting the animation production of the webtoon.
An official from the content industry said, “Korean content is emerging as an important future food that drives the growth of the national economy beyond cultural factors.” As it is expected that export routes including global OTT will be diversified, discover super IP and expand worldview between genres “It is time to think about differentiated content strategies,” he said.