What the numbers say
On July 24, 2026, the Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI) — the government-funded research arm that feeds policy analysis to the Ministry of Science and ICT — released "A Study on Analyzing the Competitiveness of Domestic Media Services and Strategies to Strengthen Them in Response to the Spread of Global Media Platforms." Researcher Kang Jun-seok's team surveyed 2,000 paid OTT users and 32 broadcasting and media experts, then scored domestic services against Netflix set at 100. Tving came out highest at 73.2, followed by Coupang Play (71.4), Disney+ (67.6), Wavve (63.4), and Watcha lowest at 57.1. Averaged, domestic paid OTT services scored 69.5 against foreign paid services — with terrestrial and cable channels scoring even lower, in the mid-50s (KISDI report; DigitalDaily).
The expert panel was blunter still: 93.8% called the situation a crisis. Asked what would move the needle most, 33.2% named "expanding the quality and quantity of original content" — well ahead of consolidating fragmented catalogs (19.9%) or fixing pricing (16.1%). Kang's own conclusion called for "comprehensive regulatory and promotion strategies," not a single lever.
The market backdrop
The gap isn't abstract. As of June 2026, Netflix led Korea's OTT market with roughly 16.17 million monthly active users, against Tving's 9.69 million, Coupang Play's 8.85 million, and Wavve's 3.97 million (Daum/K-content coverage). Tving and Wavve have together absorbed over 1 trillion won in cumulative losses since launch, and a merger between the two — agreed in principle in December 2023 and cleared by regulators in June 2025 — remains stalled three years on. Meanwhile Netflix's own Korean-content spend (roughly 451.2 billion won, per a separate May 2026 KISDI broadcast-market assessment) now nearly matches the combined outsourced-production budgets of Korea's terrestrial broadcasters — underscoring how much leverage a single foreign platform has accumulated over where Korean-made IP actually gets distributed and monetized.
The case for intervention — stated fairly
There is a real argument here, and it deserves more than a dismissal. Distribution power that sits almost entirely with one foreign platform is a genuine strategic exposure: if Netflix can outbid domestic buyers for the next Squid Game, Korean-made content increasingly earns its return abroad rather than at home, and future production financing migrates with it. Culturally, a market where 93.8% of experts see crisis-level erosion is not one policymakers can ignore on free-market grounds alone — content markets are not perfectly competitive, and a national production base, once hollowed out, is hard to rebuild. That's the same logic that underpinned Korea's original theatrical screen quota, which required cinemas to show Korean films at least 146 days a year.
Why a quota is still the wrong instrument
But Korea has already run this experiment, on film, and the lesson cuts against quotas. Legal scholars documented at the time that the screen-quota mandate didn't require Korean films to reflect Korean stories — only that Korean-made films occupy screen time — and that guaranteed exhibition bred complacency rather than competitiveness (Washington International Law Journal, 2000, Kim). Korea's film industry became a genuine export force only after the quota was cut and subsidy tied to quality took its place. The KISDI survey data point the same direction for streaming: users aren't rejecting Tving or Wavve for lack of shelf space — a quota-style problem — they're rating them lower on content depth and breadth, a production-investment problem no mandated carriage rule fixes.
Seoul's actual 2026 policy response, for what it's worth, already leans toward the subsidy model rather than a quota. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism's confirmed 2026 budget lifted OTT-specialized content production support to 39.9 billion won, up 9.6 billion won from the prior year, inside a total culture-sector budget of 7.8555 trillion won (MCST press release). That's a rounding error next to Netflix's Korean-content spend, but it's the correct instrument, scaled too small — not the wrong instrument.
The proportionate path
The better response to KISDI's data is to do more of what's already working in miniature: scale production subsidy further, unstick the Tving-Wavve merger to build a domestic platform with real bargaining weight, and resist the temptation to legislate carriage quotas or mandatory local-investment thresholds on foreign platforms. A quota looks decisive and costs the budget nothing up front, which is exactly why it's tempting — and exactly why it tends to protect incumbents' market share rather than build the content quality that KISDI's own experts say is the actual problem. Proportionate regulation here means naming the real bottleneck — underinvestment in original content — and funding a fix, not mandating one.
KISDI's report is a credible, government-commissioned diagnosis. It would be a mistake to read it as license for the reflexive regulatory response rather than the harder, slower one its own experts actually recommended.