(Vivian Vahlberg)

If one can see the future of the media in the digital age from Korea, then certainly one of the best places in Korea to look is Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS), one of Korea's biggest television networks.


The move to this new SBS headquarters building prompted the network to go all digital, all at once.

SBS made history in 2004 by becoming one of the first broadcast networks in the world to fully produce and store news digitally. Unlike most broadcasters who are making the digital move incrementally, SBS did it all at once when it moved into a new headquarters building. (For details, click here.)


This is SBS' new 360-degree studio.

So what difference has their digital leadership made for SBS' journalism? And what impact has it had on the network's ability to adjust and adapt to the new multi-media competitive landscape? To find out, I visited them during my recent trip to Korea for the Seoul Digital Forum, which was produced by SBS.

Several senior SBS editors and reporters generously answered my questions and showed me around the impressive studio, editing suites and newsrooms.


Guemnak Choe, Suhyeon Baek, Duwon Suh, and Jinwon Park with Vivian Vahlberg at SBS headquarters in Seoul.

They said that all of their content – all their video, audio, text, graphics, archives and everything else – is now input, massaged, managed, stored, produced and transmitted by computer. Even if it comes in on videotape, it's converted immediately to digital. So editors and producers don't edit tape any more in a linear fashion, with all the attendant problems. It's all done on the computer screen.


Here's the SBS control room.

This makes doing everything so much easier and faster. They can change story lineups mid-broadcast, get stories on air much quicker, access their archival footage more easily, use computer graphics more easily, and can edit and re-edit footage without diluting the quality of the image. All this can happen simultaneously, and several people can work on the same footage at the same time.

(Interestingly, in a report on SBS' digital transformation, the Kane Consulting Group, a market research company in Paris, proclaimed that "SBS is at the very top of the global scale and operating at a level of effectiveness which is higher than any other broadcaster studied by Kane.")


It's easy to change the story lineup mid-broadcast now that everything is digital.

Going fully digital has not only boosted the network's televised broadcasts, it has enabled them to more easily seize opportunities on the Web and on mobile phones. Instead of cutting personnel when they went digital, they redeployed them; there are now 12 people dedicated to the Web and about 12 dedicated to mobile. But it's all one newsroom, and all the reporters and other news gatherers feed all platforms. Most reporters have their own blogs.

Their focus has shifted from making the main television news broadcast great to serving all three platforms. They're also working toward a new identity for the evening news; since viewers are getting breaking news from the Internet, the evening broadcast is focusing more on analysis and on going in-depth.


Everyone in the newsroom got a new cell phone capable of receiving digtal video.

To do this, they've created something I've never heard of at other networks or stations -- a "future and vision desk," charged with constantly scanning the landscape and producing stories that look into the future and highlight emerging trends. The future and vision staff even produces events tied to their major reports – including the Seoul Digital Forum. Organizers hope to build the forum into the equivalent for digital media of what the Davos forum is for world economics – THE place where the major movers-and-shakers in the field gather for high-level, across-boundaries discussions of the effects and implications of major developments.


All feeds coming in to the station are immediately converted to digital.

What I found interesting, though, was that even here – in Korea and at SBS, with the highest connectivity and the best technology – the future for television programming on mobile is still cloudy.

Digital mobile broadband isn't moving along as quickly as first envisioned (see here and here). There have been disputes over which standards to use and consumers haven't signed up as rapidly as anticipated. So the audiences aren't as large as expected.

So far, it's not clear to SBS whether digital mobile broadband is going to be profitable. It takes money to produce or adapt all that programming, but they haven't yet been able to assemble the size of audience needed to attract lots of advertisers. Doing it by terrestrial broadcast is imperfect because of coverage gaps; filling those gaps will require more antennas, thus investment. Technologically, they could reach the whole country by satellite broadcast to mobile, but politically, Seoul stations are prohibited from broadcasting by satellite to rural areas because of opposition from rural broadcasters.

So as we hear all the buzz about consumers getting news broadcasts and seeing live video on their phones, we need to keep in mind that doing it – and making it work financially – doesn’t seem as easy as talking about it.

What do you think?
Please share your thoughts, experiences and reactions by clicking on the comment button below or by e-mailing Media Management Center at v-vahlberg@northwestern.edu.

Vivian Vahlberg is director of digital media at the Media Management Center at Northwestern University.