Streamlined Guides: Where K-Content Goes Next – Three Paths & Two Questions

PART FIVE: Which of the three roads Korea is on, who can make a buyer accept a condition, where the next generation came in, and what the next contract will say about tools and fans.

Editor's Note: This is the final installment in a series of Streamlined Guides that looks at the Korean content industry – how it evolved, where it stands now and which business models it could be adopting in the future. The series is written by Jaden Jaebum Park, a director and producer at Korean broadcaster MBC, who between productions writes about the economics of content industries, and about who ends up owning the pipeline.

Park has written an in-depth study that looks at how four content industries – Hollywood, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea – kept or lost the value they created. This series draws on the final part of that study, focusing on Korea. Here’s a quick recap of the previous four installments in the series:

PART ONE: Looks briefly at those three other industries – Hollywood, Japan, and Hong Kong – and draws four conditions that an industry would have to hold on to simultaneously to avoid losing its value: Velocity, Protection, Resilience & Accumulation. None of the three earlier industries held all four. Korea holds only velocity firmly and the next 18 months decide whether it gets to hold on to the other three.

PART TWO: Who is paid when a Korean drama succeeds & where that leaves the industry now. Content industries move through the same stages: Eruption, Standardisation, Diversification or Rigidity, then Redefinition or Dissolution. Korea is at the end of the second stage and beginning of the third. Whether the third stage resolves as diversification or rigidity will be decided in the next 18 months, and the signs of both are present.

PART THREE: What a Korean producer keeps when a show is a hit; the missing clause and why the eight-episode season made that omission expensive; and what three deals taught the industry about the price of a Korean right.

PART FOUR: Who owns the production pipeline when the pipeline is AI software; what happens to the middle of an industry when the tools no longer need one; and is Korean speed still an advantage when the tools can simulate it? As things stand now, Korean crews are renting the pipeline and the buyer owns it.

The Question That Has Arrived

By Jaden Jaebum Park

Every entertainment industry, at some point, stops asking what it is building and starts asking what it has become.

The longer study that this series of Streamlined Guides draws from begins every section with this statement. The study also mapped four conditions for success: velocity, protection, resilience and accumulation. And we’ll come back to those four conditions later in this report.

In Part Two of this series, we also mapped four stages in the life cycle of a content industry: first Eruption, followed by Standardisation, then Diversification or Rigidity, then finally Redefinition or Dissolution.

Japan went through all of them. Hong Kong went through three and stopped. In Part Two, we said that Korea is at the end of the second stage and the beginning of the third. And whether the third stage resolves as diversification or rigidity would be decided over the next 18 months. The signs of both are present.

If production costs, which the industry raised under the broadcasters and again in the China years, stay where they are; and if commissions keep falling and no gap finance arrives, then the three strengths that the Korean drama industry was built on will come apart faster than the industry can rebuild them.

Those three strengths are its facilities, its middle layer of mid-budget shows and the companies that made them, and the ladder on which a newcomer on set became a cinematographer, a production designer or a director.

So we're asking which of the three has begun to come apart, and who made the decisions while it happened.

In 2016 KBS, the public broadcaster that made Winter Sonata and sold Good Doctor to America, made 26% of its dramas itself. In 2026 the figure is 0%. Every drama on KBS is now made by outside companies, by figures a lawmaker's office released in October, and KBS pays for them by pre-selling streaming rights to overseas platforms on terms it calls a trade secret.

The count across the industry fell too: 141 dramas in 2022 and about 100 in 2024. Costs have not come down either. The one cap agreed this year, in July, asks that lead and supporting actors take under 10% of a film's net budget, binds no one and covers only films that take public money; no such agreement has been reported for privately financed drama, and a Netflix original can cost more than $2.2m (KRW3bn) an episode. That is the ground on which the 18 months are being counted: fewer shows, costs that have not moved, and a public broadcaster that no longer makes its own shows.

The middle layer is the first of the three to come apart. The facilities and the ladder come later in this part, in the cinemas and in the generation now entering them. Who commissions the work decides all three.

The Buyer's Timetable

Part Two of this series named four things to watch, which we predicted would land inside the same 18 months: the renewal of Netflix’s commitment to Korean content; the emergence of a second buyer; what happens to the TVING hub that went live on HBO Max in 17 Asian markets in January; and the creatives’ remuneration bill in the Korean parliament.  
 
Two of them have moved already: the second buyer closed its merger, and the bill was filed in September. Netflix changed its people. The hub is still waiting. The bill has a section of its own below.
 
Paramount Skydance completed its purchase of Warner Bros Discovery on October 6, and the study this series draws on holds that a merged buyer's commissioning terms are set in the 18 months after closing.

One month in, two documents have come out of the company, and the cuts have begun. A memo from David Ellison and his co-chief executive put the savings target at more than $6bn, most of it outside payroll. And an organisation chart that names no one for Asia: under Casey Bloys, who programmes the streaming services, international programming now sits with one executive, Sarah Aubrey, who ran originals at Max, alongside the originals of Paramount+ and Max.
 
No Korean commission has been reported. Two things are undecided for Korea. What the merged company intends for the TVING hub is unannounced. Whether Aubrey's job covers Korea at all is unannounced too. Both will be decided when the buyer needs to decide them, and the buyer's timetable is its own.
 
Netflix, the first buyer, changed its people and kept its strategy. Peter Rice started as chief content officer in October. Ted Sarandos told analysts the week before that the appointment changed nothing about what the company buys. The four-year commitment to Korea announced in April 2023 runs out this year, and the company's only word on what follows has been that investment continues, with no figure, so its actions are the only evidence.