Multi-Channel Network sets new platform: Korea

PewDiePie and Bethany Mota may sound foreign to many Koreans, but they are a couple of the most influential people on the Multi-Channel Network (MCN).

PewDiePie is an alias for a 25-year old Swedish producer on the YouTube game channel “Let’s Play,” and he has 36.4 million subscribers.

Teenage girl Mota started her haul video called “Macbarbie07” six years ago and the channel has attracted more than 8.6 million subscribers so far. These are influential figures, considering Lady Gaga has 5.8 million followers.

Mota, a YouTube celebrity, makes $40,000 a month from her videos, according to a Business Insider’s report in January 2014, and she interviewed U.S. President Barack Obama earlier this year.

Entertainment conglomerate CJ E&M on Thursday launched Digital Influencer & Artists TV (DIA TV) to provide a platform for some 400 content creators to promote the country as Asia’s No. 1 in the MCN business. It plans to expand partnership with as many as 2,000 creators by 2017.

“Contents have to become a brand,” said Lee Deok-jae, head of the company’s broadcasting and contents business, during the press conference at the Lotte Hotel, Seoul, Thursday. “We want the programs to become a consistently consumable product through DIA TV, not one-time content.”

Korean YouTube celebrity Na Dong-hyun, who uses the alias “Great Library” on his channel, is one of the earliest producers to host an MCN program in the country. Na started “PotPlayer” on web portal Daum Communication two years ago by commentating on video games, attracting more than 1,000 viewers a week. He changed his platform to Afreeca TV, a P2P technology-based video streaming service, a year later and eventually moved on to YouTube, where he has more than 975,590 subscribers.

“I decided to join CJ E&M’s DIA TV project because it has full-fledged experience in the content creating industry,” Na said. “The company will not interfere in producers’ content creating, but give technological support. My programs will keep their originality and individuality, only with higher definition.”

CJ E&M will also promote each content creator in 10 Southeast Asian countries, such as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand, where the company airs its programs on “Channel M.”

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