Kocowa
The popularity of K-dramas continues to run wild in the English-speaking world.
Earlier today Deadline analysis pointed to the continued interest in TV content from the country and now international K-content streamer Kocowa+ has revealed the UK and countries such as Australia are set to rank among its best performing territories after launching across Europe and Oceania in April.
After expanding into nearly 40 territories, Kocowa+ has been focusing on bolstering its localization capabilities, as well as expanding the number of languages for which it can offer subtitles. In an interview with Deadline, Kocowa CEO Park Kun-hee said that English-speaking usage is already booming as the streamer’s top international segment. Spain and Portugal come in next among the best-performing countries for the service, he added.
Developing capabilities for French subtitles is a priority. “French is the highest priority because when I look at the purchasing power in France, it is much higher than other countries,” said Park. “French people pay more for media and content products, according to our research.”
Kocowa says that it offers around 30,000 hours of Korean content. A key selling point for the streaming service — which offers both subscription-based and advertisement-based viewing options — is how it makes new programs available on the platform within eight hours of their broadcast in Korea, all fully equipped with subtitles in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. Kocowa is a joint venture company formed by Korean broadcasters KBS, MBC and SBS, SK Square Americas and Content Wavve.
With Korean content still riding the crest of a wave on the back of Netflix drama Squid Game and features such as Oscar winner Parasite, competition is fierce. However, Park said that he did not see global streamers such as Netflix and Disney+ as rivals. “People have the assumption that we are competing with Netflix, but actually with Netflix introducing Korean titles everywhere worldwide, they are actually developing the market for us and for the Korean content portfolio,” he added. “If anybody is trying to watch a Korean drama and they search Google, that’s how they discover Kocowa.”
However, while Park said that while there is little competition on the operations side of the business, he acknowledged the outlook is very different on the content acquisition front, where Kocowa faces stiff competition to acquire premium titles.
“As we are a joint venture company of three major broadcasters, and our initial assumption was we could acquire all the titles from them, but as the Korean content industry has grown, content prices have also increased a lot,” said Park. “Sometimes we’ve had trouble securing content for budget reasons and we’ve lost some titles because broadcasters have had to sell some premium titles to global platforms instead of our platform.”
While Park described Kocowa’s strategy in the U.S. as more business-to-business through offering its library via Roku, Comcast and Prime Video, Kocowa operates more directly in Europe in delivering content straight to its customers. However, was still able to share insight on what Kocowa has learned from its stateside business.
“Typically people believe that K-dramas will be most popular among the younger generation, but data from some of our partners show that K-dramas are also very popular among the older generation and demographic,” he said. “For example, Comcast’s K-drama consumers that are older than that of our other partners.”
However, Park also pointed out that these consumer demographic trends also depend on their various partners’ own audience, highlighting how they have seen viewership trends with Prime Video as “totally different from the other partners,” with a greater proportion of male viewers on that platform for their Korean content.
Park added that while a greater proportion of Kocowa’s U.S. audience prefer using Kocowa on a subscription basis, their customers in Latin America prefer watching Kocowa’s shows and films on the advertising-based model.
While it is still early days for Kocowa’s Europe and Oceania business to determine which model is preferred, Park said that his team is looking at how it can double down on localization efforts, including localized marketing and advertising campaigns.
Source link : https://deadline.com/2024/05/kocowa-korea-streamer-europe-oceania-park-kun-hee-1235926965/amp/
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Publish date : 2024-05-31 09:24:00
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