(2026.11.5 SINGAPORE) From Lee Jung-jae（李政宰）’s deadly survival games in Squid Game（鱿鱼游戏）to IU（李知恩）and Park Bo-gum（朴宝剑）’s poignant love story in When Life Gives You Tangerines（苦尽柑来遇见你）, South Korean dramas continue to captivate audiences worldwide.
Ju Ji-hoon（朱智勋）’s medical thriller The Trauma Code: Heroes on Call（重症外伤中心）and Lim Yoon-a（林润娥）’s culinary time-travel romance Bon Appétit, Your Majesty（暴君的主厨）have further demonstrated the global appetite for Korean storytelling.
Yet behind these international successes, South Korea’s domestic television drama industry is struggling to keep its production machinery running.
Production costs and actors’ salaries have risen, traditional broadcasters are losing advertising revenue, and independent production companies are finding it difficult to finance projects without giving up ownership of their intellectual property (IP). The result is fewer productions and dwindling opportunities for the writers, actors and technical crews who sustain the industry.
In a rare show of unity, 12 industry groups representing production companies, screenwriters, directors, actors and behind-the-scenes workers jointly appealed to the South Korean government yesterday for support, calling for a 1 trillion won (about S$900 million) medium- to long-term investment fund.
They warned that the foundations of the country’s television drama industry were at risk of collapse.
Among the participating organisations were the Korea Drama Production Association, Korean Broadcasters Association, Korea Broadcasting Writers’ Association and Korea Broadcasting Performers’ Rights Association.
According to the Korea Drama Production Association, the number of television dramas produced domestically fell from 141 in 2022 by about 30 per cent over the following two years.
The decline is particularly pronounced among the country’s three major terrestrial broadcasters – KBS, MBC and SBS. The number of drama titles they scheduled to broadcast plunged from 91 in 2012 to just 32 in 2023. Some channels have even stopped producing weekday dramas altogether.
Terrestrial broadcasting refers to conventional television transmitted through over-the-air signals, rather than cable networks or internet streaming. Weekday dramas generally refer to series traditionally scheduled for airing on weekdays, particularly daily serials.
Not all popular Korean dramas are produced for terrestrial television. When Life Gives You Tangerines and The Trauma Code were Netflix productions, while Bon Appétit, Your Majesty aired on cable channel tvN. By contrast, Taxi Driver 3（模范出租车3）, starring Lee Je-hoon（李帝勋）, and Doctor X: Age of the White Mafia（X医生：桂秀贞）, featuring Kim Ji-won（金智媛）, are examples of dramas carried by terrestrial broadcaster SBS.
The distinction matters because the crisis is particularly acute in traditional television, whose production model is under mounting pressure.
Streaming platforms raise costs and change the nature of production
The arrival of global streaming platforms such as Netflix has helped propel Korean dramas onto the international stage, but has also raised production standards and costs.
Competition for prominent actors, directors and production teams has driven up salaries and filming budgets. Elaborate sets, overseas locations and visual effects have become more common, putting further pressure on production budgets.
The difference is not merely financial. It is also changing the kinds of stories Korean television can afford to tell.
Traditional broadcasters have long catered primarily to domestic audiences, producing family dramas, workplace stories, romance and everyday social narratives that reflect Korean life. Some weekday serials ran for more than 100 episodes, relying on family conflicts, relationships and melodrama to retain regular viewers.
Global streaming platforms, by contrast, have opened up opportunities for more ambitious and unconventional productions aimed at international audiences. Kingdom（王国）, which combines historical intrigue with a zombie outbreak, and Squid Game, which explores inequality through deadly survival games, illustrate the scope for genres and production scales that domestic broadcasters would struggle to finance.
Streaming has also encouraged shorter, more tightly structured series, with stories completed before release rather than adjusted episode by episode according to television ratings.
The two models are not mutually exclusive, and internationally successful Korean dramas can still be deeply rooted in local culture. But growing dependence on global platforms raises a deep concern: whether stories about ordinary Korean families, workplaces and social relationships will continue to find financing if they cannot attract sufficiently large audiences or justify the budgets demanded by international competition.
Traditionally, broadcasters financed dramas through advertising revenue, recovering their investment through television screenings and the sale of broadcasting rights. But as audiences migrate to over-the-top (OTT) streaming services, advertising income has come under pressure, weakening broadcasters’ ability to commission dramas.
Production companies have consequently become more dependent on streaming platforms for financing. While these platforms can provide substantial upfront funding, producers often have limited control over IP rights and the revenue generated from their works over time.
Even when a drama becomes a global hit, its production company may not necessarily share in the longer-term commercial returns.
Song Byung-joon（宋炳俊）, chairman of the Korea Drama Production Association, said fewer productions meant fewer job opportunities. As production teams and experienced professionals left the industry, its overall capacity to produce dramas would deteriorate further.
Writers and production crews are losing their livelihoods
The crisis is already affecting industry professionals.
Park Hae-young（朴海英）, the screenwriter behind My Mister（我的大叔）and My Liberation Notes（我的出走日记）, attended the press conference as head of the copyright committee of the Korea Broadcasting Writers’ Association.
She said all the assistant writers on her team were now out of work, with some storytellers beginning to move into other fields such as webtoons and video games.
She also noted that domestic production companies and broadcasters could no longer afford to finance dramas independently.
Kim Jong-chang（金钟昌）, chairman of the Korea Television and Radio Directors Association, said the industry was undergoing profound changes as it faced competition from short-form videos and new artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Conditions on production sets had become extremely difficult.
The impact extends beyond writers and directors. Song Young-woong（宋永雄）, head of the Korea Broadcasting Performers’ Rights Association, disclosed that the copyright royalties collected by his association had fallen from about 47 billion won in 2024 to 34 billion won in 2025.
Industry seeks 1 trillion won to rebuild production pipeline
To reverse the decline, the 12 groups called for policy targets to restore annual drama production volumes, a 1 trillion won medium- to long-term investment framework, and a cross-agency response mechanism involving government ministries and the National Assembly.
Specifically, they proposed that the government provide 200 billion won annually over five years to help finance about 40 mid- and low-budget dramas each year.
Under the proposal, each drama would have a budget of around 10 billion won. Producing 40 dramas would require 400 billion won, with the government covering half the cost and broadcasters and OTT platforms providing the remainder.
The fund is intended not merely to subsidise individual productions, but to restore a more stable investment cycle, giving smaller production companies and younger creators access to financing.
The groups are also calling for fairer arrangements with global streaming platforms over IP ownership and downstream revenue, so that producers and creators can share more fully in the commercial success of their works.
Korean cultural exports flourish, but domestic production base lags
The difficulties facing South Korea’s drama industry contrast with the growing commercial influence of the Korean Wave overseas.
Statistics from the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Foundation for International Cultural Exchange show that exports associated with the Korean Wave reached US$18.975 billion (about S$24.23 billion) in 2025. Of this, US$8.788 billion came from consumer goods and tourism-related exports.
Korean dramas have helped fuel overseas interest in the country’s culture, food, beauty products and tourism. But international success does not necessarily mean the domestic production ecosystem is equally healthy.
Private commercial television broadcaster Channel A reported yesterday that the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s 2027 budget for broadcasting and audiovisual content would fall to 87.3 billion won, from 91.8 billion won in 2026.
The Korea Media and Communications Commission’s budget for supporting broadcasting content would also decline, from 16.8 billion won to 12.4 billion won.
Industry players argue that government support is being reduced even as private-sector investment retreats.
However, the industry’s claims of an impending crisis need to be viewed in context.
Reuters yesterday quoted Kim Yong-hee（金容熙）, a professor at Sun Moon University’s business school, as saying that the problems raised by industry groups primarily reflect the decline of traditional terrestrial television broadcasting, rather than a broader contraction of South Korea’s content industry.
Employment in the broader content industry increased from 688,122 in 2024 to 693,090 in 2025. By contrast, employment in the broadcasting sector fell 2.3 per cent in 2024.
The figures suggest that the content industry is not uniformly shrinking. Rather, traditional television production is bearing a particularly heavy toll as audiences and investment shift towards new platforms.
The central challenge is therefore not simply how to produce more internationally successful dramas, but how to ensure that the money generated by the global Korean Wave supports a sustainable domestic production industry.
