KT Corporation (née Korea Telecom) has initiated a major technology stack refurbishment spearheaded by Synamedia, in turn marking the US vendor’s bullish arrival at the South Korean operator – but at the expense of who? The broad-reaching beast that is Synamedia’s Converged Headend – covering encoding, transcoding, ad insertion, packaging, multiplexing, content acquisition and insertion, origin services and reliable IP transport – has shaken up KT’s IPTV back-end and has kicked out several long-standing vendor suppliers. KT’s IPTV service, Olleh TV, is the specific recipient of the upgrade to Synamedia’s virtualized headend in an on-premise deployment in KT’s own data center environment – which claims to be the first virtualized headend in South Korea. Long-term encoding supplier Media Excel appears…