South Korea is to leverage its secret weapon--Korean soap operas--to help promote its technology standards overseas now that the Korean industry, regulators and promotion agencies have gone through a comprehensive round of convergence of IT, telecommunications and content.
Eun Jun Lee, Director-General of the Korea IT International Cooperation Agency (KIICA) in Singapore, and Leo Hwa Chiang, business development director, explained how the Korean government had this year converged its IT, telecommunications and media activities. The Ministry of Information and Communications is also merging with the Broadcasting committee.
The Korean IT Industry Promotion Agency (KIPA) used to be responsible solely for software and IT promotion through a network of iParks all over the world. Today, iPark has morphed into KIICA and has added telecommunications and e-government to software promotion, essentially putting all the technology front offices together for the world to come do business.
KIPA now is internally focused at developing the Korean IT industry from within.
The focus has also moved up to a policy level. While iPark was happy with gaining partners at the company and industry level, KIICA is also focused on promoting Korean technology standards at a government to government level.
This year, the focus will be on promoting WiBro wireless broadband and T-DMB (terrestrial digital media broadcasting) digital television, a Korean alternative standard to the DVB-H (digital video broadcasting-handheld) standard used in many countries in Europe.
While everyone was expecting digital television to take off on mobile phone handsets, the small form factor means that adoption has been slow. Instead, what is happening in South Korea is that many cars and taxis are now being fitted with larger screens for T-DMB, though whether it was safe to drive and watch Korean soap operas was another matter entirely.
Being digital, the coverage and picture quality while on the move is better than conventional analogue broadcasting.
Lee explained how today there is a big change going on. "We are seeing telecom and broadcasting companies merging. The line is still very blurred. Korea has embraced the change but today it is still unclear who has ended up with more power, the broadcasters or the telcos," he said.
He added that many South Korean telecom companies are now buying up content producers, game developers and animation houses.
Today, KIICA is looking to set up a number of centers for animation software training in the region. The first one will be in Singapore and a further one will be in Thailand or Vietnam.
"The animation market is still growing and Korean companies are looking at lowering their production costs. But before we can outsource, we need to upskill; to teach animation and game development," Lee explained.
Leo said that a lot depends on the political and economic situation in Thailand. For instance, in his most recent visit to the ICT Ministry's Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa), he said that many of the rules were there but nobody was doing the regulating.
Thailand still has a rule for registration of online games, introduced in July 2003 in the wake of public backlash against youngsters Ragnarok addiction, but it is today loosely enforced, if at all, for new online games.
This uncertainty has meant that the limelight has shifted to red-hot Vietnam and unless the climate improves soon, things are too uncertain for any serious investment.
Play video
» Blades for superior performance
There are currently no comments for this post.