SK Telecom announced today that the company has signed an agreement with Sony Pictures Television International(SPTI), one of the world’s leading media companies, to establish a strategic alliance for content service

Under the agreement, SK Telecom will provide rich video content, including the latest films from Columbia and Tristar and popular TV series from Sony, to customers through the company’s mobile multimedia service platforms, NATE and June.

While a number of popular TV series aired on HBO, such as “Sex and the City” and “Rome,”are already available, this new service will further expand SK Telecom’s library of video content, offering Hollywood blockbusters such as “Spider-Man 3,” the “Da Vinci Code” and other TV series such as “The Tudors”.
– orginal article from this digital daily article

the cost, according to the article, will range between US$1-2 per film/episode. that’s not much at all. but will the low cost factor be enough to entice the korean crowd who have successfully forced the paramount, universal, and fox out of its dvd market - along with making countless companies and jobs suddenly disappear locally - by ‘(perhaps not so) friendly’ file sharing.

street vendors selling pirated dvds are a common feature of everyday street life in seoul. i was out in daehakno with a friend the other day and we saw a guy selling four dvds for 10000 won.

• jaz: ‘hey, it’s a tad higher than other places.’
• friend: huh?
• jaz: in shinchon you get 5 for that price. gwanghwamun’s the cheapest - six.
• friend: oh, ok. you’re pretty with it.
• jaz: my friends know all this stuff - actually i know quite a few who buy these. mostly foreigners though.
• friend: yeah. i don’t think too many koreans would buy or be interested to buy these anyway. why bother when you can just download? waste of money and space. download, watch, and delete once you’re finished with the film.

this pattern of film consumption is also quite apparent in pc-bangs, where you can usually find a network folder(s) with illegally dowloaded media content including films, music, and scanned manga. they’re there for you to enjoy while you’re there, and for you to take away - and perhaps delete eventually - if you wish.

this kind of ‘instant’ access to media then allows for ‘constant’ access via portable devices - it’s intersting to think about the notion of instant/constant connection in the korean urban context, the connection provided via bangs (instant) and mobile phones (constant) - both distributed and deeply embedded in contemporary korea culturally and figurally (cf. my paper @ interactive entertainment 2007 conference & forthcoming chapter with fantastic adam greenfield in Urban Informatics: Community Integration and Implementation).

almost all of the korean participants in my past (on cyworld) and current (on mobile play culture of seoul trans-youths) research expressed their ‘zilch or bye’ approach to the cost of mobile media use: they ask, ‘why use it when there’s fast and almost free connection for not-so-portable devices (PCs) oh-so-everywhere?’

i say, i’m not sure.

why take up the new hollywood VOD on mobile? i’m not sure.

perhaps a flat-rate plan would work. if you’re into (hollywood) films, then VOD subscription does definitely sound like the smarter option than S-DMB (T-DMB’s free though the handsets are very expensive). and no one can deny that moblie media on demand will be ‘it’ for the future - VERY near future. however, it’s such a shame that the korean telcos see not much future in the film theatres, the power house backing up the korean cinema industry itself (despite the fact that the screen quotas system is decreasing and constantly under threat from US).

obviously k-telcos recognise the significance of ‘lifestyle-adhesive mobile plans‘ that offer (mostly financial) benefits for the needs of their chosen lifestyle - e.g. dicounts for tickets, texting, shopping, and petrol. korea’s HUGE on discount cards, well, discount in general (one of the phrases visitors learn seems to be “kkakka jooseyo (cheaper please)”), but yes, discount cards are the ones that fill koreans’ wallets rather than cash, as noted by this new york times article.
also, there’s no doubt that telcos are aware of the significant decrease in the number of cinema patrons (2006: 26,601,710 | 2007: 18,843,934 | 29.1% decrease, according to the korean film council) some of which can be attributed to the telco’s abrupt pull out from the discount deal with cinema complexes (pre-april 2007, subscribers were able to get about 20-30% discount on tickets) - actually, it was the cinema complexes who pulled out, claiming that telcos were putting too much financial demand on them. cetizen.com’s survey conducted in 2006 shows that this was actually the main reason (51.6%)for the decrease, and that 48.5% would be going to see more films regardless of the film’s quality.

so i’m quite skeptic about this upcoming mobile hollywoodness, and i’m not very happy with HOW mobile video is being developed: mobile media and “old” media industries must be conceptualised as inherently inter-related, not separate, and their development must be mutually beneficial for both and beyond to remain sustainable in any country, but especially korea with its once exciting but now subsiding “wave.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 11:56 pm and is filed under stories - old & new, korea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.