The Evolution of Korean Drama Online
In a previous post, it spoke of how the technologies of today are challenging cable bills. And now, we’re getting quite specific with Korean drama online by way of Viki TV (YouTube page).
What is Viki TV?
Viki TV is a fantastic global television site that has allowed millions of viewers to watch, discover, and even add subtitles to prime time television movies and shows in as many as 200 different languages.
Viki aims to do away with the cultural and language barriers that have stood between the different nations and their media. It has, through recent years, even reached a global audience of almost 1 billion users!
An Example Of A South Korean Drama
That’s significant, because that’s a large percentage of the entire world’s population of people. It has a primary focus on Asian media, but also features media from many other countries from around the globe.
Features of Viki TV
Viki allows you to watch, via streaming, premium licensed content in a similar, albeit much more convenient way than other video streaming services. Viki was actually the first platform that allowed users to add subtitles to videos in real-time, which is what gave it such a great reputation among the global audience.
The subtitling system even allows for multiple languages, boasting subtitles currently in up to 160 different languages.
If you’re interested in free viewing, you can watch many shows and movies on Viki for free, with no charge. But if you want a more premium membership so that you don’t have to see advertisements, they offer a great price of membership.
Once you subscribe, you’ll never see another advertisement, which streamlines your viewing pleasures. Its well worth it to many, and it helps to support the bustling movement of globalizing media culture.
What Is Another Example of a Show on Viki?
One prevalent show that is getting a lot of attention is Strong Woman Do Bong Soon, played by Park Bo-Young. It’s an intriguing and hilarious drama/comedy about a young woman named Bong-Soon. She was born with super human strength, which turns out to be hereditary.
[DramaFever: 6 Reasons Strong Woman Do Bong Soon will hook you until the finale]
Bong-Soon helps a bus driver that is being attacked by some thugs, and a small group of thugs wind up attacking her. She is very easily able to vanquish them. During that time, Ahn Min-Hyuk (real name Park Hyung Sik) arrives on the scene and sees Bong-Soon in action. Since Min-Hyuk is the CEO of a large scale video gaming company, and loves this type of thing, he thinks that Bong-Soon would be an outstanding body guard for himself and his company.
He also decides to offer her a position in the planning department if things turn out well with her as a bodyguard. The story continues as crimes continue to take place around the neighborhood, and Bong-Soon, along with Min-Hyuk, wind up teaming together to fight crime and solve cases. Its a really intriguing, hilarious, and fantastic show, and really displays the creativity of Korean dramas and comedies. Its highly recommended.
A Brief, Recent History of Korean Media
The popularity of Korean dramas has soared over the recent years as a broad global interest in Korean food, music, film, pop stars, and other cultural exports has had a widespread rise. The Asian media has actually given a name to this, calling it “Hallyu“.
The spread of Korean pop and dramas throughout South, Southeast, and Eastern Asia was at the fore-front of the rise in Korean media popularity since the early 1990’s.
The liberalization of the media in Asia and the importation of Korean programs by the Chinese CCTV was what first showed how successful Korean entertainment could be. It sparked a huge boom for K-Drama across China. Since then, the Korean Wave, as they call it, has evolved from simply being a regional development into an entire global phenomenon, which has since been boosted by social media and the internet as a whole. Korean music videos have even aided in the popularization of K-Media.
In the last 1990s, just before the turn of the century, there was a major financial crisis around Asia. This led many media lovers to begin dabbling in Korean programming, because at the time it was a cheaper alternative. They discovered that even though it was less expensive, at less than half of the price of Hong Kong programming, it was not lacking in quality, but was actually in many ways better than what they were used to.
Ever since the early 2000’s, South Korea has steadily climbed its way to the top as a significant exporter of pop culture and tourism, which has actually become a large part of its economic boom.
The increase in popularity of Korean popular culture world-wide has even caused the government of South Korea to support the media industry with funding and subsidies for budding start-up businesses. A great deal of the Korean Wave’s success can be attributed to social media and social networking sites which gave rise to the Korean entertainment industry’s drama-hungry over seas audiences.
[FinancialPost: How Korea became the world’s coolest brand]
Over the years, the Korean film industry has had such a large interest in becoming a world-wide cultural phenomenon that it even went so far as to start learning from Hollywood, and even used that as a slogan for a while. They began promoting the media companies as a commercial market, which helped to spark interest from investors and really set things in motion to change the perception of such media to be a very real economic avenue.
Today, much in the case like Bollywood, it’s a thriving industry and something that users from around the globe are using to enhance their daily lives and find joy through incredible shows and movies.
Conclusion
If you are just now learning about Viki TV, or Korean dramas in general, you would definitely benefit from at least taking a trial of their premium services. No matter where you live, you’ll be able to find something that you will like on Viki TV, and it will probably already have the subtitles available for you to be able to understand the language of the show.
Compared to other media sites, it has far more content for you to enjoy, and you’ll wind up learning about other cultures in the process. You might even find something that hasn’t been subtitled in your language, and be able to contribute to the growing wealth of knowledge in media and help other uses to be able to enjoy the shows.
Its a wonderful community that crosses the borders between country and culture, and in this day-and-age, anything that brings people closer together is a positive thing. You can feel good about supporting Viki TV, knowing that you’re helping the world become a much better place to live in.
Head on over to Viki TV now and take a look as you won’t be disappointed. View their website link at Viki Pass for a free trail.
