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| ▲ House of Cards advertisement by Netflix. Provided by imdb.com. |
Everyone staring into a small phone screen—a typical scene on everyday public transportation. People these days see the world through their mobile devices. The information they receive via their mobile becomes their new eyes, ears and legs. Hence, it is inevitable that the information evolve to become more easily consumable. People tend to consume media in two ways during short time spans, or long media series for binge-watching at once. This is where multimedia services like Netflix broke in. It perfectly reflects the current media trend of new media replacing the old media.
The so-called snack culture has been trending recently. This web-based culture means a quick habit of consuming media like eating a snack within ten minutes. In line with the snack culture, various new media is gaining prominence, represented by the short youtube videos or mobile games such as candy crush. With the new media’s accessibility and interactiveness, users are able to instantly consume mass media and provide feedbacks for everyone to see. Thus, numerous multimedia services compete to take bits of busy users’ important time.
However, using this snack culture in reverse, there are multimedia services that try to take the user’s time entirely. They use “data curation services,” which means that they provide individualized mass media services for the users. By selectively recommending only the ones that the user would love to see, those services aim to set a person to binge-watch several series of programs. In other words, by carefully analyzing big data, they prove to the users that the media services they provide are worth spending their precious weekends on. Netflix is one of these on-demand internet streaming service companies that became most successful in the area of individualized mass media services.
Netflix started as an American DVD-by-mail service in 1998. It only started its streaming service in 2007, but yet has grown into a global streaming provider of movie and TV series, launching services worldwide. Netflix has reported that it has over 81 million subscribers worldwide (including more than 46 million in the United States) as of April, 2016. Although Netflix has gone through several crises, after its astonishing success in its first original drama series House of Cards in 2013, it not only started providing a greater variety of media services but also started producing its own original series around the world.
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| ▲ Growing Netflix subscribers worldwide. Provided by wsj.com. |
Netflix recommends individualized lists for users based on the massive database that it created by accumulating more than 30 million viewer selections. It not only collects the different programs that the users watch, but also the rewind, stop, or fast forwards. From this information Netflix is able to see which actor and which type of scene the users prefer. Not only this, but from the additional link services that it provides such as the Rotten Tomato rating site or Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Netflix expands the sphere of media that the users can enjoy.
By clicking the tags and links that Netflix provides on the drama series, users are given more information related to their interests, which leads to enjoying other programs that the Netflix provides. Users then interact with other audiences about the program that they just watched, or are going to watch, further expanding the pool of information that can be available to other Netflix users. This way, Netflix takes a significant portion of the user’s time, sometimes hours and hours.
The way that Netflix uses this technology further in their production, is by producing user-friendly media from the start. For instance, Netflix creates different versions of drama teasers according to the actor preferences of each user, and recommends them selectively. House of Cards, and several more original drama series are taking this route. Not only their original productions, but others are also advertised using the Netflix data. It selectively shows media advertisements to reduce advertising budgets and at the same time to increase its effects. No wonder that they say that “Netflix knows better about your movie preference than you.”
Netflix could be said to be trying to substitute the original cable TV or Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services. Although the number of media programs it possesses may be small, Netflix appeals to users who are used to a cord-cutting environment—those who prefer enjoying various media services in different places, rather than having to stay at home watching TV to enjoy the service. If not, they aim for cord-shaving, to gather light-users who would wish to pay lower fees every month for streaming. Already, many people have been using peer-to-peer (P2P) services such as Torrent, or charged downloads to binge-watch. Netflix developed their own character to embrace all different users of this dispersed digital environment into one through their experimental project.
Although Netflix has been a great hit in its domestic market and several other countries, it is hard to estimate whether it will succeed in Korea. Netflix has just started providing services in Korea, having its launch in January, 2016. However, considering that the previous services that have copied Netflix or similar Over-the-top (OTT) services such as POOQ, Hoppin, TVing did not result in meaningful profits, the prospects for Netflix seem bleak. The fact that the amount of different media that Netflix provides for Koreans is relatively small compared to other countries might also function as a weakness: even their original production House of Cards is not available at the moment.
Nevertheless, it is also true thatKoreans consume various mass media, especially American drama series via their mobile or laptop. In fact, according to research by the Korean Film Council (KFC), a significant portion of Koreans use their PC or mobile for watching movies. 79 percent of teenagers, 71.9 percent of views in their 20s, 67.3 percent of views in their 30s and so on utilized their electronic devices for consuming media. Also, according to a 2014 study by the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI), zero-TV users, otherwise known as cord-cutters, amount to 15.3 percent of the total household, and are expanding ever since. Considering those facts, previous failures by similar services could be blamed on the weakness of those services themselves. There still could be rooms for Netflix to gain success in Korea—will the catch-phrase “Netflix and chill” be seen in Korea, too?
