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Seouled Out

Korea in the digital vanguard

by Shashank Tripathi, Korea


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Korean IPTV on a PS3

Ever since Sony Computer Entertainment Korea and KT announced the launch of the HD IPTV service MegaTV for the Sony PS3 a few months ago...



... I have wondered what it looked like, and how it worked.

Guess what I discovered on the good old YouTube:
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Internet to overtake TV as an advertising medium

A Daewoo Securities Company (part of the Korean Development Bank) released a report yesterday--I have trouble finding *anything* on its site, http://bestez.com--intentionally not hyperlinked here as the site doesn't welcome anything other than an old Internet Explorer. And when I try IE with Maxthon, it wants to install some arcane plugins before it shows me anything. No thanks.
Read more »



 

Korea: Officially addicted

As though some truly outlandish stories of the dangers of digital addiction were not enough (for instance, a game addict conking off after playing a game for 50 hours at one go), Internet addiction has now become a serious health issue in Korea.

Not only is this worrisome phenomenon posted all over the Net, it is now also in the reputable American Journal of Psychiatry. Here's a quote:

Some of the most interesting research on Internet addiction has been published in South Korea. After a series of 10 cardiopulmonary-related deaths in Internet cafés and a game-related murder, South Korea considers Internet addiction one of its most serious public health issues. Using data from 2006, the South Korean government estimates that approximately 210,000 South Korean children (2.1 percent; ages 6–19) are afflicted and require treatment. About 80 percent of those needing treatment may need psychotropic medications, and perhaps 20 percent to 24 percent require hospitalization.

Officially, over half of the middle school students have been tagged as addicted, and there are even boot camps for curing addiction!

Knee jerk reaction or nipping a budding problem before it hits full bloom?



 
 

Update from Seoul

To all of my loyal fans (yes, you all in the back there, too), apologies for this unforeseen hiatus. A whole lot has happened in these three months, or has it?

YouTube launched its Korean presence, to a predictably lukewarm response. It is not easy to crack a portal-crazed market where the ilk of Naver Play and Daum TVPot already have a headstart. Then, of course, there are the good old market leaders in the form of Pandora.tv (and all its wonderful Activex requirements) and Iple.

A quick look at the depth and caliber of these offerings is enough to know why YouTube has its work cut out for its venture into the world's no. 1 broadband nation. Here's a quote from a Webpro news articles for the numerically inclined:

"YouTube competitor Pandora TV the No. 1 local video-sharing site in
Korea, received an average of 997,000 daily visitors during the same
period. Other video-sharing sites such as Mncast, Mgoon and Gom TV had
two to five times more visitors than YouTube"

Next, living up to a perplexing trend around the world, a number of me-too social networks have made their entry into an already populated market. Our friend at Koreacrunch has put in the hard work to include a highly informative post, complete with visuals. Some of these are a shameless ripoff of their global counterparts.

Third, in a seminal and perhaps trailblazing move, and further bolstering the call of "digital convergence", Korean TV stations announced that they will drop analog signals by 2012 altogether and go 100 percent digital.

Korea has grown to nearly 45 million mobile subscribers. Samsung is making WiBro headway into its neighbor. SK and KTF are opening up with their USIM chips (with LG Telecom missing out), and so on... But let's leave something for the next few posts.

Hope the year has started well for everyone and continues in the same vein!



 
 

What's with Korea and CGM/UCC/UGC?

I ran into this LG video contest and wondered what has become of the big "UCC" (User Created Content, the local acronym for Consumer Generated Media) rage that I mentioned in a blog post earlier this year.
Read more »



Tags:  Daum, CGM, UCC
 

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About Shashank Tripathi

Shashank Tripathi, nicknamed Shanx, believes that a rocking hammock, a good book, and a tall glass of strawberry milkshake are the way to save the planet. But that does not fill all the hours in a day, so he cuts his teeth on digital advertising and media, spending a good part of his life expressing opinions as though they were going out of fashion, or drawing boxes that connect to each other with shiny black arrows. Occasionally, he has also been accused of poetry.


Locus: Based in Singapore, but a devout jetrosexual.
Focus: Media, Advertising, Ubicomp, All things Digital.
Other: LinkedIn, Facebook

 

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