Korean Shows
Extra Blog
When it comes to Korean entertainment fan subbers are one of the most important people because they translate the Korean TV shows/ movies into different languages. This allows for the show to reach a more broad audience and exposes actors outside of South Korea. “Dramafever was the first site to provide a legal alternative for watching South Korean drama online to audiences in North America, five to six million unique monthly users of which were watching dramas through illegal sources at the time (Garcia 2010)” (Tolou, 14 ). Dramafever was one of the first websites I used to watch Kdramas. They usually offered the first 3 episodes of a show and then in order to watch the rest you had to subscribe. The website was taken down in late 2018. One of the biggest platforms for Kdramas is ViKi, it is also has one of the biggest fan sub communities. “ViKi is a community-powered or ‘crowdsourced’ 2 Internet platform allowing “anyone to discover and enjoy the best of world TV and movies in their own language”’( DWYER, 218). ViKi is one of the platforms I use the most to watch Kdramas, they have hundreds of shows, not only from Korea but from all over the East Asian countries. For the first time after 2 years of using ViKi I looked at their community tab to see what they offer their subbers in exchange for volunteering. According to the page, subbers are given perks special perks and get to make friends from all around the world. At the end of the day it is still a form of digital labor because the fans are volunteering their time to sub the episodes of Kdramas without getting monetary pay. While I was on ViKi I looked through some of the comments for the Kdramas that have low ratings and realized that more than half the time the reasons the shows have low rating is because they have not been subbed into either English or Spanish fast enough. So fans that want to see the show right away end up giving the show a low rating because they are mad at the slow subbing which in turn can become a disadvantage to the show because it could have been an amazing show but due to slow subbing it has a low score which makes people feel like not watching it. I was one of the people that choose to not watch a show due to its low ratings before I realized that the ratings usually do not have anything to do with the show itself. This is a big example of fandom influencing the success of an artist.
“Explore Thousands of Shows and Movies from around the World.” Viki, www.viki.com/explore?country=korea.
Dwyer, Tessa. “Fansub Dreaming on ViKi.” The Translator, vol. 18, no. 2, 2012, pp. 217–243., doi:10.1080/13556509.2012.10799509.
Tolou, Vasileia. “Sustaining the Hallyu: International Social Media Promotion and Buzz for South Korean Movies and Series.” (2014).
