US streaming platform Netflix anticipates more opportunities for live events in South Korea, a company official said, as it prepares for its biggest livestream this year, a highly anticipated BTS comeback concert in Seoul.
The one-hour event, to be streamed live to 190 countries in the company’s first global broadcast of a concert, marks the release of the group’s first new album in more than three years, and the start of a global tour in April.
Netflix hopes today’s BTS event in Seoul’s historic Gwanghwamun Square will be “a spectacle unlike anything we’ve seen before,” said Brandon Riegg, its vice-president of non-fiction series and sports.
“I would imagine that with our commitment to partnering with our producers in Korea, there will be many other opportunities for other live events,” he told a press conference yesterday.
“We have some things perhaps in the works I can’t speak to right now.”
The company’s investment in South Korea will continue growing, Riegg said, as it boosts infrastructure to enable more live events.
“Korean culture, Korean entertainment, which is so beloved, clearly just makes it an obvious choice to continue deepening that partnership.”
A group of journalists said Netflix’s guidelines on coverage were excessive, however.
“The organisers should respect the public nature of the symbolic space of Gwanghwamun and the right of the media to record it,” the Korea Video Journalist Association said yesterday.
Garrett English, the executive producer of today’s show, said its location and designs would feel modern in keeping with the band’s vision while staying respectful to the space and in harmony with it.
Netflix’s guidelines bar the media from livestreaming the entire concert and limit posts of video footage to clips of up to five performances, each for a maximum of one minute.
The free concert is expected to draw up to 260,000 spectators, including 22,000 ticket holders, making it one of the area’s largest public gatherings since the 2002 World Cup, officials have said. — Reuters
