Paid TV operators such as KT Skylife and CJ HelloVision are rushing to OTT (Over The Top) market following the deal. OTT from Netflix is starting to take off in Korea, and paid broadcasters are accelerating their transformation to survive. OTT is a service that provides various media contents such as broadcasting programs, movies, and education through the Internet.

KT Skylife is expected hold a press conference at SKYLife headquarters in Sangam-dong, Seoul on September 19, and will showed users` experience of viewing users UI (OS) and Skylife on Google`s Android operating system (OS) (OTT) set-top box `TELEBEE`.

TV is a set-top box that can choose a desired channel without any agreement, and the basic pack consisting of 8 channels including terrestrial and comprehensive channels is KRW 3300 per month. For 30 channels, such as movies, entertainment, and sports, you can choose to pay a monthly fee of KRW 550 per channel.

KT Skylab TV`s feature is that you can watch various contents such as YouTube, WATCHA PLAY, Naver V live, and Facebook video on TV screen. Combined with the content recommendation engine developed by WachchaPlay, it also provides content recommendation curation service based on viewing behavior analysis of users.

The TV is equipped with Google Android TV 7.0, which has a powerful specification with a quad-core processor in the OS. KT Skylife explained that it is the first OTT receiver that has been released to date to support high-definition 4K and HDR. With the remote control, you can quickly and easily find the content you want by voice search, and with the G button on the remote control, you are ready for the Google assistant launch. Set-top box price is KRW 89,000.

CJ HelloVision also confirmed that it will launch TV-based OTT in early November. At the same time, the final pre-test (CBT), which will be attended by more than 200 people, will be held. CJ HelloVision plans to develop the new OTT as a next-generation TV platform that enables convenient viewing of contents provided by OTT, MCN, SNS including traditional TV contents. Especially, it is a strategy to use `AI and Big Data` as a `home and life platform` to enable viewers to enjoy contents more easily.

Korean paid TV operators are stepping into the OTT market because of the limited growth of existing paid TV broadcasts. It is also attractive that the OTT market is highly likely to grow. According to the Korea Communications Commission, the domestic OTT market will grow to KRW 708.1 billion by 2020.

KT Skylife has expanded to OTT to penetrate 2030 households and 1 city or city market, which have been relatively weak. Therefore it invested KRW 1 billion in content and set a goal of securing 200,000 subscribers by next year. CJ Hello Vision launched the first N-screen service `Teabing` in Korea in 2010 and started the OTT project early, but it is in a hurry and reinvigorated this time. DeLive launched the OTL box `DeLive Live Plus` in June last year, supplying 100,000 units in a year, leading the market.

"We want to provide a new media experience that has never been seen on TV, a TV-based OTT platform, in accordance with the fast and powerful evolution of the OTT market," said KT Skylife, president of SK C & We will become a video platform operator with different dimensions in cooperation with multinational operators in different areas such as North Korea and Wattcha Play. "

By Kim Ji Young kjy@


[ copyright ⓒ The Digitaltimes ]