Nina Jobst
Research expert covering South Korea
Online video market in South Korea - statistics & facts
Watching online videos is part of the everyday routine of most South Koreans, as this new standard for consuming video contents is easily accessible. The usage rate of online video services in South Korea has risen during recent years reaching a majority of South Korean consumers. While the online video streaming services has grown, Korea and Korean contents have become itself a source of inspiration and oftentimes get turned into video content. While South Korea has some domestic video-on-demand services, such as Tving and Wavve, the popularity of global market leader YouTube, and for SVoD services, Netflix was high.
Although the average acceptance of advertising in online videos in South Korea was higher than the global average, there was no clear one opinion on ads on video streaming services. Especially SVoD services also increased their own production of content, and spearheaded by Netflix, more Korean content was produced by streaming services, producing hit shows like Squid game and other K-dramas.
Subscription-Video-on-Demand (SVoD) market in South Korea
The openness to paying for online video content has increased on the South Korean market, with the most well-distributed type of paid Over-the-top (OTT) video service type being Subscription-Video-on-Demand (SVoD). Accordingly, the number of SVoD users in South Korea was expected to increase during the upcoming years. SVoD services offer a variety of content available to consumers for a regular, mostly monthly, subscription fee. The perk of this model used to be watching content without any ad-breaks, but since then business models have changed and some have gone ahead to introduce advertisements.Although the average acceptance of advertising in online videos in South Korea was higher than the global average, there was no clear one opinion on ads on video streaming services. Especially SVoD services also increased their own production of content, and spearheaded by Netflix, more Korean content was produced by streaming services, producing hit shows like Squid game and other K-dramas.
Consumer behavior
Korean content was not only popular abroad thanks to the influence of Hallyu, the Korean wave, but was also among the most preferred types of OTT content domestically across all platforms. While most consumers liked to watch video content on their smartphones, as more people invest in Smart Home technology, installing online video applications on a Smart TV or video game console has become an industry standard. Despite online video services popularity peaking during social distancing measures due to the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), online video services retained their popularity and are used very frequently.
