Hello

This post doesn't mean that I'm returning to complete this thread.
Rather, I meant to work tonight on a long post to rec.arts.sf.written
and came across something I didn't remember writing. Turns out in
October 2019, I did write an introduction to Viki, the most important
K-drama streaming website in most countries today, and the most
important law-abiding K-drama streaming website this thread
completely failed to cover.

I haven't tried tonight to update this post (or even to figure out
what should've been in the spot that says "XXX", undoubtedly much of
why I didn't post at the time). I have too much else on my plate
right now after two weeks lost to COVID-19. But I think it's worth
posting just the introduction, even without updates. Dramas I would
have listed at Viki, I may never write about here, but here's what's
primary:

Korean dramas available tonight for streaming without subscription
payment, in the US, at:

KoCoWa - 0
Tubi - 10
AsianCrush - 59, heavily padded with common-currency Web dramas
OnDemandKorea - 111, ditto
Viki - 341

I didn't check whether Viki, too, pads its free list with Web dramas;
it almost certainly does pad it with variety shows and other non-
drama Korean TV. Doesn't matter; it still has more full-length
dramas for free than anyone else. And yet about two-thirds of its
Korean dramas are subscription only. KoCoWa claims to have the
biggest library of Korean TV in the Americas, and has made it harder
and harder to list its drama offerings, but even if it has more, it
can't have many more.

So Viki matters, and I'm relieved to be able to tell y'all about it,
from a time when I knew more about it than I do now.

BUT EVERYTHING BELOW WAS WRITTEN IN OCTOBER 2019, AND MAY WELL NOW BE
OUT OF DATE.

VIKI

<https://www.viki.com/>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viki_(website)>
<https://www.viki.com/explore?type=series&country=korea>
(Viki offers no easy, reliable way to select all its K-dramas and
nothing else; this URL also gets its non-fiction Korean TV)
<https://www.viki.com/explore?type=film&country=korea>

My inference: Viki exists to serve YOU, because YOU, as a digital
native, know social media sites are the only sites worth visiting.
Viki has everything you might want - variety shows and idol-group-
specific shows so you can watch your faves again and again; hot
YouTube creators doing their creatorly things (mostly beauty, but
you want K-beauty tips, don't you?); all the latest dramas, and a
smattering of older ones in case you want bragging rights. If
commenting on the dramas and right onscreen isn't enough for you,
right next door is Soompi, number one site for discussing the latest
dramas and all other things K. And let's not forget, if you want to
get more active, Viki provides a vast range of materials to help you.
You can segment and subtitle shows, or request shows, or who knows
what? Plus, Viki allows you to expand your horizons by offering lots
of Chinese-language shows, more Japanese ones than any other law-
abiding streamer except subscription-only Crunchyroll, and samples
from other parts of Asia, constantly changing so you can become truly
well-rounded. Once you've immersed yourself in all Viki has to offer,
you'll never want to leave.
Reality check: Viki actually does not refuse customers over the
age of twenty; even before DramaFever died, Viki was the site of
choice for most of the thirtyish and above fans whose voices were and
are loudest in the K-drama blogosphere. Also, although this version
of Viki, focused on Korea with Chinese shows as also-rans, resembles
the versions long offered in the Americas and Europe, probably also
in India, other versions of Viki are, and probably have long been,
offered in other parts of the world in which Chinese content is far
more central. Separately, Viki's current focus strictly on Korea,
China and Japan isn't its historical norm; look at the list of
countries you can select shows by to get a better sense of what Viki
has offered over the years, Whereas KoCoWa and OnDemandKorea are
defined by their relationships with Korea, and Viu has bet heavily on
that area, Viki's origins and subsequent development have ridden the
Korean waves, but have never depended solely on them. That said, now
as never before, Viki in the Americas really does get nearly "all the
latest" K-dramas.

Viki today is neither a K-drama monopoly nor K-drama Central; it
demonstrably doesn't want to be either of those things; but in the
Americas, it today looks rather like both. How'd that happen?

In 2007 three MBA students - two at Stanford, one at Harvard (wife to
one of the Stanford two), for a Stanford class project, started work
on Viikii ("video wiki"), which crowdsourced subtitles for YouTube
videos. They kept it a small-scale thing until they'd all graduated,
but it gradually morphed from a YouTube-dependent download-based
project in the Bay area into a video on demand streaming site based
in Singapore, with major venture capital backing and deals with lots
of content providers. As far as I know, the founder whose wife
wasn't also a founder was the first CEO, but the couple remained
actively involved too. They're from South Korea, and Viki came out
of beta in 2010 just as the K-drama part of the "Korean wave" was
peaking, so although Viki was purveying video from many places to
many places, K-dramas seem to have dominated from the first, probably
not only in the Americas.

Viki, unlike the other sites I've talked about with their limited
geographical ranges and careful expansions into new territories, came
out of beta *everywhere at once*. I don't know how much Viki in
Mongolia or Viki in Lesotho had to offer on day one, but Viki didn't
turn anyone away from the site itself just because of their location.
(In fact, one of their incentives to volunteers now - I don't know
about back then - is that really active volunteers get to ignore most
geographical licensing, and watch stuff no matter where they are. If
you can turn Korean or Chinese into Xhosa or Fijian, VIKI WANTS YOU.)

In 2013 Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten bought Viki. The founder
couple left to start a site in their native South Korea; the founder
CEO continued in that role, but left in 2015. Viki has since had
three "permanent" and one interim CEOs. The latter came from Rakuten,
but the "permanent" ones have all come from Viki. At some point the
headquarters may have relocated from Singapore to San Mateo, the
dateline of recent press releases in English, but when I submitted a
help request, I was told that desk keeps Singapore hours; I have no
idea where the CEOs have actually been based.

A proper corporate history would list success after success (and
maybe a few failures), but for present purposes I'll simply note that
Viki, unlike DramaFever, did little to curry favour with the existing
institutions of K-drama fandom. (I've seen few, if any, Viki ads at
DramaWiki, even after the latter lost its DramaFever support, or
HanCinema, which advertises KoCoWa instead.) This is partly because
it had no epic conflict with those institutions to make up for, as
DramaFever did after early 2013 (and as, arguably KoCoWa has had from
getgo), but also partly because Viki benefited from fans' pre-
existing preferences for fansubs over professional subs. It also
benefited from DramaFever's predilection for paywalls, and finally,
while I'm not sure how much subtitlers cost, Viki not only avoided
that cost, but also that bottleneck, through its volunteers, so it
could tackle more projects. Viki got more current K-dramas than
DramaFever every year, 2011 through 2015.

That year marked the first serious inflection point in Viki's career.
Soompi, a vast discussion and news site, was the original K-fandom
institution, and in 2015 it was for sale. Viki bought it. Viki had
ignored K-drama fandom (except the parts of it that subtitled at Viki);
now Viki ran fandom central. To add to the cachet this brought,
Soompi had its own video streaming business, so suddenly Viki offered
about 100-150 older dramas available nowhere else, mostly from MBC,
which had ruled South Korean airwaves from the mid-1980s to the mid-
2000s. Viki's only 1990s drama known to me came with this purchase
(although only Viki has ever tried to reach back farther; it once had
a team of volunteers subtitling a show from the 1970s, though there's
been no news for years). DramaFever still probably had a better
library, but otherwise, by this point, was starting to seem irrelevant.
That said, Viki never fully absorbed the Soompi tranche of dramas;
most obviously, it never finished replacing the professional English
subtitles they came with, with Viki-style subs; subbing in other
languages also faltered.

A very different inflection point came with the arrival of KoCoWa two
years later. Viki almost immediately made a very public deal, which
brought back many of the dramas KoCoWa had yanked away - and even got
Viki a few of those yanked away from DramaFever. The terms were:
1) Viki would now have a two-tier subscription system, the more
expensive subscription being required to watch dramas identified as
KoCoWa's which were paywalled. 2) Viki would create a top-level
section of its site identifying dramas with KoCoWa. And 3) KoCoWa
dramas at Viki might be geographically restricted to the Americas,
*and* linguistically restricted to English subtitles, excluding the
usual dozen or more languages Viki routinely added.

This last is the key point that shows how antithetical this deal was
to Viki's core values. Viki's popularity metrics routinely show
paywalled shows high on the lists (meaning many of its viewers
already pay), and the site was actively trying to increase its
paywalledness when KoCoWa showed up, so the sudden increase in Viki's
paywalled contents shocked neither customers nor employees much. But
English-only went against the site's founding and core values. One
of the few shows present in every single version of Viki I've checked
is called "Living Tongues". It's a relic of Viki's much-ballyhooed
efforts on behalf of endangered languages; Viki doesn't talk much
about those any more, but another such relic is that it's *possible*,
at Viki, to subtitle in about 200 languages - considerably more than
the total *non*-endangered languages left in the world! But most
individual shows wind up with subs in fifteen to twenty languages,
and it's the absence of these that probably hurts most in the English-
only rule applied to some shows from KoCoWa.

This deal, then, must have been something of a bitter pill, Viki
stuck accepting terms it didn't like, but since then, the shoe seems
more and more to be on the other foot. Remember I mentioned that
KoCoWa's only other country, outside the Americas, is Japan? Turns
out that got started in *2016*, making it, not the American service,
the senior branch; but it's supported by Rakuten - Viki's owner.
Meanwhile, as I write this, KoCoWa seems to have reset its "like"
buttons (presented as hearts) all to zero, but that might have been
from embarrassment - the total number of "likes" I saw at KoCoWa was
always fewer *digits*, sometimes *several* fewer digits, than the
equivalent at Viki. Viki has always had permission to keep some
shows free that KoCoWa paywalls, although I suspect this pattern is
becoming less common; and KoCoWa's existence has perversely freed
Viki to focus increasingly on cable dramas.

One spectacular result of that focus is Viki's deal with JTBC. This
deal appears to cover not only the Americas but also Europe and XXX,
and although it doesn't keep JTBC dramas from Netflix or Viu, it's
taken them away from OnDemandKorea, as we've seen. Viki has been at
least somewhat selective, as we've also seen, omitting one drama ODK
had to stop subtitling anyway, but it's accommodated JTBC this much,
anyway, that it's added a whole lot of JTBC variety shows. (Variety
shows are reliably less popular than dramas at Viki.)

Other recent changes at Viki: 1) The deal with KoCoWa included a
tranche of a couple dozen dramas, mostly paywalled to this day. I
now know that these dramas were all moderately old - 2006 to 2012 -
and all from KBS and SBS, as if to begin to compensate for the MBC
bias created by the Soompi tranche. The other shoe dropped this year,
when Viki jettisoned most of the latter, except for about a dozen
shows dating 2006 to 2012, making MBC even with the other two. Both
tranches were and remain Americas-only.
2) Viki also eliminated this year an enormous tranche of movies
and TV shows largely from the US. Many of the TV shows in this
tranche weren't complete - Viki had a few episodes each of lots of
old cartoons. Aside from prestige movies and these cartoons, other
notable contents included a bunch of martial arts movies, and <Ozzie
and Harriet>, whose sojourn at Viki is immortalised in most of the
site's training materials. What the whole tranche had in common was
uncertain or non-copyright status in the US, and it was only
available in the Americas.
3) Viki also eliminated this year a small tranche of movies from
China and/or Hong Kong (Viki doesn't distinguish between these),
about a third of the Chinese-language movies the site has carried
this year. It had these movies in many markets, and seems to have
dropped them in all of these simultaneously.
I interpret all three of these moves, as well as the JTBC deal,
thus: The Americas have been and remain Viki's most important market,
but the site consistently benefits from wider licenses. Now it has
at once eliminated most of its Americas-only content, and used its
new power to get deals like that with JTBC that replace that content
with shows available through much of the world. And although its
older K-dramas are oddly scattered, as we'll see, Viki increasingly
drops shows worldwide as well as adding them as widely as possible.
I also interpret these moves thus: Older shows are in general far
less popular at Viki than newer ones, even more so than at other
streamers. Relieved of competition with DramaFever's library, Viki
no longer had much incentive to keep the MBC classics, so it didn't.
Instead it's made a deal with the newest of the K-drama powers, JTBC,
which didn't even exist before 2011, making it much more congenial to
the new-look Viki.

--
Joe Bernstein, clerk and writer <Kdeurama@gmail.com>