South Korea’s latest online celebrities: stray cats eating

The stars of the latest online trend in South Korea stay out of sight most of the day. Viewers don’t seem to mind waiting for hours while nothing happens. When the stray cats finally come to eat the food left out for them, people watching online sit enraptured by their feline charms.

The live-streamed Cats Meok Bang show is a twist on an online trend of young South Korean men and women tucking into feasts in real time, while viewers send messages and sometimes virtual cash. In a country where young adults increasingly live and dine alone, the shows have become so popular, some hosts have made small or big fortunes from the virtual cash sent from viewers.

While the stars of those programmes seek a rapport with their fans, cat TV has gained viewers despite its uneventfulness. Some avid fans say they quit watching soap operas, reading online news or playing mobile phone game to watch. One says instead of smoking every time he gets stressed at work, watching the cats restores his peace of mind. While cats have generally fascinated the internet, a show devoted to watching them eat is unusual. But it has helped change negative images of stray cats in South Korea, which has traditionally seen them as thieves.

Cats Meok Bang, a mash-up of the Korean words for broadcasting and eating, began by accident. While visiting his mother-in-law in a mountainous village in southwestern Korea, Koo Eun-je saw a cat outside, wondered how it survived and put out leftover fish for it. The next day, the cat was back so Koo kept feeding him, and the others who followed. Finally, he set up a surveillance camera and live-streamed the scene online.

“We started the channel simply for me and my wife to watch, but other viewers also started watching it,” the 35-year-old who previously worked as a web designer said in an interview near the lake where he goes bass fishing for the cats. “We guessed that there would be one or two cats, but now it turns out that 17 cats are coming to eat food.”

Four months on, 110,000 South Koreans watched the show on a monthly average and more than 10,000 of them have bookmarked the show. Some viewers sent him virtual cash items, which help cover his living expenses and cat food. Others send food and donations to Koo. As his cat TV got popular, at least one copycat show emerged.

Koo has turned the area outside the family home into what he calls “a restaurant for cats.” Its decorations change regularly. A chalkboard features the day’s menu, and about a dozen cats’ nicknames are written on a piece of paper. A fish bowl and trays of food sits on a pink blanked covering the ground. Everything is at a standstill except a pinwheel spinning in the background and small toys, a rubber duck and sometimes hula dancers, in the foreground. Serene music plays from a speaker. Larger toys like a Hello Kitty doll are in the background, and beyond them are rice and pepper farms and a patch of sky.