Abstract

South Korea is one of the fastest aging country in the world. This has led to lively discussions in various fields such as labor supply, financial structure health about the changes that population aging will bring to the future of the fields and related industries. On the other hand, such discussions are hardly found in the broadcasting media industry. This study fills this gap and predicts how the demand for broadcasting and Internet video would change as population ages.
The research questions of this study are grouped into three categories. The questions in the first category deal with population aging and the changes in media use. The questions in the second and third categories deal with changes in the use of broadcasting and Internet video services respectively, in relation to population aging. More specifically, the topics that are dealt with in the first category are per capita media usage, bias in media use, demand for live media and demand for interactive media. The topics that are dealt with in the second category are subsistence of linear broadcasting and TV homeshopping. The third category deals with demadn for UGC(User Generated Contents) and SVOD(Substription Video-on-demand).
In this study, answers to research questions are presented based on the in-depth interviews with media experts and media user surveys. The policy implications derived from this study are as follows. First, as the demand for live media is expected to decrease and OTT use is expected to increase despite the aging of the population, the government should draw an answer to the following question as soon as possible: what is the fundamental reason to maintain the linear broadcasting. Second, as the demand and supply for interactive media services are expected to increase with population aging, it is necessary to prepare various support plans for the elderly to use interactive media service without difficulties. Third, as increase in the use of interactive media services, such as UGC and live commerce, will lead to increase in user(or viewer, consumer) claims, more efforts should be made to protect users of these services. Fourth, since the use of SVOD is expected to increase and linear broadcasting is expected to decrease despite the population aging, it is necessary to prepare a regulation to protect users from product placement(PPL) that are included in the contents provided by SVOD services.