NBCUniversal Plans To Stream Korean Content On New Platform

U.S. viewers will soon have a new way to see Korean dramas and future drama productions will have access to a new source of U.S. investment.

NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast, plans to launch Peacock, an OTT subscription service during the first half of 2020. To provide Korean content, NBCUniversal recently signed a three-year deal with the video streaming platform Wavve, a collaboration between three Korean TV networks, KBS, MBC and SBS. The deal involves licensing content but also means NBCUniversal will invest in productions of future content, much the way Netflix has successfully done during the last four years.

Wavve, which was launched in January 2019, as a way to counter the influence of Netflix, intends to spend $50 million (KRW60 billion) on original content production in 2020 alone. Because Wavve was launched as a merger of Pooq and Oksusu streaming platforms, it already has 14 million subscribers.

Five years ago the way most U.S. consumers streamed Korean content was via Rakuten Viki, DramaFever, or OnDemandKorea platforms. DramaFever, which had over 400,000 subscribers, became a subsidiary of Warner Bros. in 2016 and in 2018 stopped streaming. Since that time, some of the content DramaFever aired has reappeared under new licensing deals on the remaining channels. 

Netflix entered the market in 2016, both airing international content in Korea and airing Korean content in other countries, as well as investing in the production of original content. Their first original production was the historical zombie drama Kingdom, starring Ju Ji-hoon, Bae Doona and Ryu Seung-ryong.

Although the company’s initial expansion into Korea was not welcomed by local networks, subscriptions grew rapidly. According to the newspaper Chosun Ilbo, by 2019 Netflix had attracted more than a million users in Korea on Android mobile devices alone. The entertainment giant now has more than 2.4 million subscribers in Korea.

Despite the original lack of enthusiasm over Netflix entering Korea’s entertainment market, the company eventually struck deals with some of the major players. In Nov. 2019, Korean media entertainment giant CJ ENM and its subsidiary Studio Dragon signed a three-year content production and distribution agreement with Netflix. Studio Dragon has produced k-series such as Guardian: The Lonely and Great God, and The Legend of the Blue Sea, Signal, and Stranger. 

That same month, JTBC Content Hub, the content arm of the Korean media company JTBC,  also signed a three-year licensing deal. The cable channel is home to several popular recent k-dramas, including Sky Castle, Crash Landing on You, World of the Married, Reply 1988, and Itaewon Class. As of 2020, Netflix can stream JTBC dramas in more than 190 countries.

According to the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA), a government agency monitoring Korean entertainment, about 18 million U.S. viewers currently watch Korean content—and that’s only about five percent of the international viewership.

It is not yet known which coming dramas will air on the Peacock streaming platform.