Riding the Wavve: Platform Imperialism and South Korea’s Streaming Market

Abstract

Through Hallyu, a major transnational phenomenon of Korean pop culture, South Korea moves the domestic market and presents an updated version of the nation to the rest of the world. East Asia, for the longest time culturally influenced by Japan and China, today is mediated by the strength of this peninsular pole of media production. Korea in a few decades ceased to be insignificant in the regional market to be the gateway to the construction of regional identity and to East Asian youth consumption. Currently, Korea has a highly developed infrastructure, a with a cable penetration of 100% and cheap cable and internet bundles. Korea became one of Asia’s largest video streaming markets. These characteristics hampered the development of foreign platforms in the country, as Netflix, which only recently took off. Netflix’s interest in Korea lies in the country’s specific regional influence. Other markets framed the company’s advance in Asia as Black Ships, but how has the Korean media framed it? And how have local conglomerates dealt with the advance of Western platforms? In this chapter, we’ll focus on Korea’s streaming market leading from a platform imperialism framework, an updated literature review, and analysis of local newspapers. We contend that there are two significant phenomena happening. First, local media conglomerates SBS, KBS, MBC, and SK Telecom formed Wavve, a national platform, with the direct objective of facing the “foreign evil” that Netflix represents to the country. Second, the Korean industry is weaponizing foreign platforms’ global influence to expand the reach of Hallyu in an attempt to bypass traditional media restriction in other markets, such as Brazil and Spain. Thus, there is a two-way strategy in which the local industry uses Netflix to reach foreign audiences but locally is hostile.