KSCY_ A Study on the Social and Cultural Impacts of OTT Services on the Korean Media Industry in the Post-Coronavirus Era: How can the Korean Media

ABSTRACT
Since the advent of COVID-19, our daily lives around the world have been limited by the restraints that the virus has brought us. Instead of face-to-face external activities that can be enjoyed with multiple people, such as traveling, watching performing arts, or going to the theaters, online activities have become most of what people can do. As such, the usage rate of media devices such as smartphones, TVs, personal PCs, and tablet PCs has increased by more than 20 times compared to traditional media (magazines, books, paper newspapers, etc.) in South Korea (Kim 2020), and the film industry has experienced one of the biggest changes due to the coronavirus. Viewers have become accustomed to enjoying movies and entertainment at home through OTT services rather than going to the cinema, and distribution of content has been shifting towards streaming directly to consumers. In addition, it will not be an exaggeration to say that the traditional production system has almost come to a halt due to the fact that production companies have stopped doing theatrical releases.
The coronavirus has had negative effects on the media industry in Korea (Op Cit., Kim, 2020) as OTT services have encroached on the domestic paid service market. Although the domestic OTT industry has been growing every year, domestic media companies have been lagging behind in competitiveness compared to global media conglomerates, representatively Netflix. The companies that have become rapidly popular in Korea have been producing various Korean content while recognizing the poor production environment of Korea's cultural industry and investing in the name of huge subsidies.  But also, most of these services create more avenues for global companies to enter the domestic market rather than foster smaller domestic companies.
The study will focus on examining the social and cultural impacts of the global OTT services in the Korean media industry, and furthermore, formulate a survival strategy for the Korean cultural industry that takes a holistic and long-term view with the competitiveness of global OTT services in spite of the coronavirus crisis.  Firstly, this study will define OTT services and introduce both notable Korean and global OTT services; secondly, it will describe the effects that the entrance of global OTT services have had on the production, distribution, and content models of Korean media; thirdly, it will discuss the criticized ‘monopoly’ of Netflix in the Korean media market, and assess if it is true. Lastly, it will propose positive measures for nurturing the ecosystem of Korea's cultural industry in light of our findings.