These days, It is quite easy to find that global IT companies bought Korean companies. I posted that EA Korea has acquired Korean Game Developer named J2M. Also last month US Media company, Lifetime Networks acquired Roiworld(www.roiworld.com) which is famous for its fashion game targeting teenager girls.

Recently the hottest issue in Korean M&A market was that Google acquired Korean Blog Developer, TNC on September. TNC is the first company that Google acquired in Korea.

TNC is Blog Developer founded in 2005. It started open source blog publishing application called Tatter Tools, now it is changed its name to Textcube(textcube.org). About 1,500 developers are participating for Textcube’s development through Tatter Network Foundation. Also It launched membership blog service, Titory(www.tistory.com) with Daum, Korean #2 Internet Portal, and blog media site Eolin(www.eolin.com) in 2006. Now Tistory is ranked #1 for its unique visitor among blog services in Korea and ranked as #8 among all domains in Korea.

Then why Google acquired TNC ? It is not that obvious, but in my opinion, Google Korea seemed to want to localize its service more in Korea market. Korea is one the countries that Google is not #1, many Koreans pointed the reason for Google Korea’s failure to localization. Also another reason for acquisition might be the people in TNC, there were outstanding developers in TNC. Google Korea might want to hire them through acquisition. Still Google Korea has not announced that what they will gonna do with TNC’s resources in detail, but I think that this acquisition would be the plus point for Google Korea.

SK Telecom has strived to enter into the contents market by acquiring IHQ(movie production), CUmedia(formerly known as YTNstar, entertainment channel for cable broadcasting) and other small players. But there was no viable return from those efforts.

Yesterday, CUmedia and Korea’s No.3 cable MSO C&M decided to establish a joint company according to one of the established internet media.

Through this agreement, CUmedia secured stable path to distribute their contents through C&M’s network. Form C&M’s perspective, they can counterattack other MSOs who have  been expanding their contents business portfoli aggressively. In fact, CJ and Tbroad owned powerful program prividers as subsidiaries and made continual acquisition of small PPs.

Korean IPTV, on the other hand, has been in a bottle-neck for contents supply due to the politics between cable MSOs and PPs. However, yesterday’s news about the joint company gives the clue that SK Telecom, the mother company of CU media and SK Broadband (No.2 IPTV Provider), could overcome their disadvantaged position in contents supply nogotiation.

And I hope this news could trigger the dynamic growth of the whole Pay TV market in Korea by providing fair environment for competition among all Pay TV players.

The world’s first Mobile TV, SDMB, was launched in 2004 followed by TDMB in 2005. Mobile TV was expected to make ‘Mobile Broad Casting’ popular and thus people were watching on how it went. Especially, T-DMB penetrated into Saudi Arabia, Norway and Vietnam and still in progress.

While it is globally expanding, Mobile TV in Korea seems getting unsuccessful. - Even though subscriber are increasing in Korea, players are in the red for their business.

DMB subscribers and viewers are increasing as above and ETRI forecasted that DMB viewrs in Korea will be more than 30 million by 2012. However DMB providers still cannot make money from their business since they started DMB service in 2006.

What causes this situation?

1. Weak revenue model
TDMB is soley based on Advertising revenue, and the growth is sluggish. Because of small viewer base, it is unattractive medium for the advertisers. Additionally, KOBACO, the public organization that distributed all broadcasting ads in Korea, applied the same assessment criteria for TDMB. Only for a few cases, TDMB could qulify for the stardards.

2. Poor contents
Mobile TV is a personal media, for which viewers watch only in specific situations such as in the subway etc. But the TDMB players are mostly terristrial broadcasters and thus only try to re-transmit their used contetns without producing new contents for DMB. Smaller players tried to produce contents exclusive for DMB but failed to achieve the economies of scale. This in turn failed to allure more viewers and showed vicious circle.

3. Slow advance
TDMB tried to generate additional revenue from TPEG(the convergence service with navigation) and interactive shopping service. It can’t be achieved by themselves but need partnership from other players such as telecom, homeshopping, etc. But each party pursued their own interests and thus the business advances so slowly.

Media business by its own nature cannot get into stable phase so quickly, and we should not judge so hastily.
But unless the players and regulatory make the wise solution for those problems, we may not see the ’successful mobile TV’