A Study on the Strategies for Korean OTT Contents to Enter International Markets

Although Korean video contents began its journey to the global market along with the popularity in Asia in the latter 1990s, the genres exported were mostly drama and most of the importers were Asian countries. However, recently, we have seen a series of successes of Korean OTT contents such as , and in the world market. The study explored the strategies for Korean OTT contents to enter the global market by analyzing the story-telling of Korean OTT contents from the perspective of cultural proximity. In the past, Korean video contents focused on specific subjects and genres such as love and socio-historical events. However, the recent Korean video contents are expanding to cover various subjects and genres. Especially, they pro-actively use the subjects and genres represented by Hollywood such as zombies, science and adventures, constructing universal story-telling that can heighten cultural proximity and adding characteristics of Korean culture, which secured competitiveness as Korean contents. While and chose zombies, a regular subject representing Hollywood, unlike the existing zombie products, they presented an epic for the zombies to induce sympathy of the recipients. Also, they secured differentiation from the existing zombie products by arranging unique backgrounds such as the Chosun Dynasty and the school. Also, unlike the Hollywood contents such as zombies or monsters emerging as a result of viruses or environmental pollution, in the Korean products, the alien creatures were born as variables of human desire and this resulted in destruction of the human race. This puts emphasis on human spiritual culture, meaning the Oriental value system. Also, while increasing cultural proximity by using the universal problems of the contemporary society such as materialism and violence, they led the recipients to take interest in Korean play culture such as ‘Red Light Green Light’, ‘Dalgona Candy’ and ‘Squid Game’. As can be seen from this, Korean OTT contents, while securing familiarity by adding Oriental cultural characteristics to universal culture codes, constructed new stories, resulting in favorable responses from the recipients.