National television moves to the region and beyond: South Korean TV drama production with a new cultural act

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe study examines Korea’s unique television production systems and TV drama production strategies in the context of Korean dramas’ rising international trade along the line with its new governmental act to television industry. In 2006 the government passed a new cultural act specifically to promote TV content production, as an amendment of the Media and Cultural Industry Act. This act specified that media content production could exclusively perform using a special purpose company (SPC) system as a limited periodic firm, upon registration for creating media content only. The transnational Korean dramas using SPC programming grow the dramas’ export value in both production and distribution sectors, in light of divergent transnational media flows. Korea’s dual production system takes advantages of the government’s SPC policy, which simultaneously affects the TV content distribution sectors over the domestic outlets that excel international flows of K-dramas.