SeriesOn Ends After 6 Years
Half of Services Discontinued This Year Are Video
Cutting Underperforming Services to Focus on Short-Form Content
Naver recently terminated its ‘Series On’ service, which provided movie and broadcasting content. This comes six years after the service was launched in 2018. The company is focusing all its efforts on short-form videos and has significantly restructured its existing video business.
According to the IT industry on the 26th, Naver ended the sale of ‘Series On’ content on the 18th and is currently processing refunds. Although it reached 10 million paid users by the end of 2022, the company decided to terminate the service due to rapid changes in the platform market. In particular, its revenue ranking on Google Play sharply dropped from 114th in April to 189th this month.
This year, Naver began streamlining by shutting down or integrating six services, including a real estate app and news issue timeline, half of which were video services. In September, it discontinued the video mobile application ‘Now’ and merged it with the video streaming platform ‘Naver TV.’ Earlier in February, Naver ended the ‘Style TV’ service within Naver TV. Style TV aimed to gather lifestyle videos of famous celebrities and influencers and link them to shopping, but it failed to gain significant popularity.
Kakao’s situation is no different. This year, it ended the KakaoTV app service and subsequently stopped the video-on-demand (VOD) comment service. Launched in 2015, KakaoTV was a new concept video service that allowed easy sharing of video content and chatting while watching videos by linking with KakaoTalk. However, currently, only some video content such as news, entertainment, and live services remain. There is speculation within and outside the industry that the service itself might be withdrawn. Kakao’s portal Daum also ended its ‘Daum Movie’ service earlier this year after 24 years of operation.
The dominant trend in video services is shifting to YouTube and short-form content. According to the app analysis service Mobile Index, YouTube’s share of usage time in the video streaming sector reached 88.84% last month. Netflix (4.06%) and TVING (2.57%) followed, while Naver TV accounted for only 0.02%.
YouTube is even challenging the positions of national platforms like KakaoTalk and Naver. According to a report published by app and retail analysis services WiseApp, Retail, and Goods, KakaoTalk (48.5 million users) remained the most used app last month but is being closely pursued by YouTube (46.73 million users). Naver ranked third with 44.26 million users. Based on estimated usage time, YouTube took first place by a large margin, surpassing KakaoTalk (32.2 billion minutes). An industry insider noted, "YouTube has already replaced not only video but also search, shopping, and community services," adding, "Domestic platforms have no choice but to put their video services on the operating table to compete."
© The Asia Business Daily(www.asiae.co.kr). All rights reserved.
