Bak Seung and his business partner travelled to a Korean broadcaster’s outpost in Los Angeles in 2008, armed with $50,000, to inquire about licencing Korean television dramas for online streaming.
They were received with puzzled looks. Outside of the Korean diaspora, who would watch, let alone pay for, K-dramas? Would subtitles be useful to American viewers? What is streaming, exactly? (It would be another several years before Netflix really took off and “binge-watching” became a couch sport.)
There was a time before BTS, the Oscar-winning film Parasite, and Netflix’s Squid Game — examples of South Korean cultural output that has transformed cross-border entertainment.
Bak and fellow Korean-American entrepreneur Park Suk, on the other hand, had already noticed a surge in demand for Korean content across the English-speaking world and were ready to capitalize.
Pirated shows were being downloaded or streamed by fans. They were planning to subtitle hours of material for non-Korean speakers who enjoyed K-drama.
Bak, co-creator of the streaming service DramaFever, which was ultimately sold to Japanese holding company SoftBank and then to Warner Bros in 2016 for a “nine-figure sum,” says, “We were discovering this raw demand that seemed to have developed organically.”
The site didn’t just focus on Korean dramas; it also experimented with content from all around the world, including Bollywood, Turkey, and Eastern Europe. None, however, managed to connect with users in the same way that Korean performances did.
A unique collection of cross-currents underpins each South Korean cultural phenomena that has swept the world in recent years. From the early 2000s onwards, music labels in K-pop made serious efforts to reach out to other markets. They formed bands with Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Asian-American trainees and produced music in a variety of languages.
Another important motivating force was the K-pop groups’ well-organized fan bases. As part of all-out social media blitzes to build anticipation around their music, these fans would stream a chosen artist’s new releases and videos.
