Advanced Television

Korea’s MBC strikes YouTube deal

October 24, 2011

By Colin Mann

Korean broadcaster MBC has agreed with Google to provide its TV drama and entertainment programmes through the latter’s online video sharing site YouTube.

Under the agreement, MBC will provide 10,000 hours of dramas and entertainment shows aired before 2005 for YouTube, which will be distributed around the world starting next year, according to the broadcaster.

The deal marks the first time a Korean broadcaster is providing such a significant amount of content on YouTube.

“We’ve been actively working with K-pop industry officials, entertainment agencies and album producers to help provide K-pop content on YouTube,” said Yeom Dong-hoon, CEO of Google Korea. “We expect that this partnership can boost the Korean Wave one step further, through TV drama and entertainment content,” he added.

Brian Suh, head of YouTube Partnership at Google, noted that the first generation of YouTube was filled mainly with user-created content but said the second generation would be provided by professional content providers such as MBC.

Suh said that rather than providing full content, YouTube would break down the content of a programme into short clips and put advertisement between the clips.

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