The starting gun for the real time IPTV market in Korea has finally been fired, after years of its government holding off approving requests to offer multicast based IPTV there. Existing services, until this October, have been VoD, as we understand it, without the use of quality of service protocols, but operating over super fast lines. The big players in this market to date have been SKT owned Hanaro Telecom with its Hana TV and Korea Telecom’s MegaTV.
At the start of 2008 Hana TV dominated with around 850,000 subscribers, and the later launched MegaTV lagged considerably with under 500,000 subs. But since then Hanaro has stumbled in the public eye, with a scandal involving the release of confidential ISP customer information, which was under investigation from before the company was sold, in a deal completed in February. Lack of public trust has seen it lose subscribers down to 800,000 while MegaTV has drifted up to 700,000.
The Ministry of Information and Communication and the Korean Broadcasting Commission had been arguing for several years over which one has the right to regulate the area, but now the Korean government has stepped, and in February it merged the two regulators into the Korean Communications Commission, which will begin licensing IPTV with genuine broadcast capability from October.
The move is expected to mean that more players join in, and it should lead to partnerships between operators and broadcasters such as KBS and YTN. LG Dacom is another player expected to enter the market and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute reckons that Korea will immediately leap to 2.2 million IPTV households by the end of 2008, and around 5 million by 2012.
KT has already come out and said that its CEO will oversee the project and will invest around $680 million on network expansion alone, mostly upgrades to fiber to the home, in order to implement IPTV services and a further $105 million to enhance IPTV software and install more servers.
Korea already has an established cable TV community as well as traditional broadcast channels.
Applications from companies wanting to launch IPTV must be submitted to the Korean Communications Commission regulator by the end of August and launches will be allowed from October. Applicants have to be Korean owned, and will be judged using six criteria including public benefit and accountability tests.