K-drama streaming wars: how Netflix hits Kingdom and Sweet Home complicate Korea’s increasingly crowded TV market
- Since Netflix started showing Korean dramas in 2016, it has changed the template for how they are made and brought them to an international audience
- With Disney+, HBO Max, and Apple+ all expected to follow suit soon, Korean cable and terrestrial channels’ productions will have to up their game
It was only a few years ago that the K-drama industry found itself in the midst of a massive change, when South Korean cable channels (OCN, JTBC and tvN), with their fresher and edgier content, caught up with traditional networks (KBS, SBS, MBC).
These days, the Korean drama landscape is reshaping itself once more. However, rather than a change it may more aptly be described as a complete metamorphosis.
The streaming era has well and truly arrived. Much like the rise of cable channels, streaming services have once again shaken up who produces, finances and distributes Korean content. But a greater transformation is being seen in the series themselves, and one of the chief drivers of this has been the rapid evolution in who watches them.
It wasn’t just cable channels and streaming services that caught the zeitgeist; public channels made some of the first moves that would alter the market. Descendants of the Sun, for example, originally an SBS show that eventually passed on to KBS, set several precedents for the industry.
It was the first major show entirely pre-produced before airing and it secured a large amount of its financing through presales to the foreign market – the presale to Chinese online platform iQiyi alone covered an estimated 40 per cent of its costs.