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The Electronic Times
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
By Lee Jin-ho & Chung Jin-yeong



Foretelling 'gold rush' in the content market, large enterprises, including Samsung Electronics, KT, SK Telecom and CJ, are bolstering investments and business capacities in digital content sector.

These leading information technology companies are pushing content businesses such as games, music, movies and characters either directly or indirectly via their affiliates.

Samsung Electronics jumped into competition in game and music distribution business via its affiliates Anycall Land ( http://www.anycall.com) and Samsung Funclub ( http://www.samsungmobile.com). In alliance with Wizmax, an online music service firm, the world second largest mobile phone maker launched one-stop online music service 'YEPP Studio'. Samsung Electronics also signed a contract with Yahoo!Korea to join forces for developing games.

In conjunction with its subsidiary, SK Communications, and WiderThan.com, SK Telecom is putting its concerted efforts into acquiring various content products, while building its own wire-wireless content platforms. Realizing limitation in growth with standard wireless communication services, SK Telecom has formed 170-member portal business division, consisting of 6 teams, including portal planning, content business, music business, game business, messaging business and media combination team.

Among these content business units, the music business team made a large amount of investment into building a music database, 'Music license bank', to secure music sources. And the game business team is intensifying its influence in game industry by supplying its products to content providers.

KT, which is promoting game and content business via its subsidiary KTH, recently began acquiring content to be used in integrated wire-wireless communication and communication-broadcast convergence environments. KTF became a leader in 3D mobile game market while KTH is aggressively investing in popular games, attempting to dominate copyright licensing market.

Linking business of its affiliates, CJ Internet, CJ Entertainment and CGV, CJ Group is concentrating its resources on clustering and creating synergy in movie, music, game and the Internet segment. CJ Group is also taking initiative in taking leadership in overseas content market including China by acquiring Plenus.

"It is quite natural for enterprises to expand investment of manpower and funds in areas with high potentiality. Enterprises are paying attention to culture industry again despite their bitter experiences in the past because they are now confident that content market will see fast growth as new media like digital multimedia broadcast emerged," said Lee Byeong-uk, executive director for culture industry committee in the Federation of Korean Industries.