DramaFever

» see dramafever.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

dramafever was americas-only at the licensing layer. the rights it bought covered the united states and canada, with parts of latin america added later, and from an address in turkey the site returned a block notice instead of an episode. turkey runs its own television export business, dizi sold by the hundreds of hours into dozens of countries, so the trade dramafever sat inside was a familiar one. it was just pointed the other way, and i was outside the window it opened.

seung bak and suk park launched it out of new york on 6 august 2009 after a beta, aimed at an audience they had already located: people watching korean drama on pirate streaming sites with volunteer subtitles of uneven quality. the offer was the same episode with subtitles somebody was paid to produce, and no reason to hide the tab. you could watch free with advertising or pay a few dollars a month to skip it.

that worked better than the size of the niche suggested. by 2013 it was past three and a half million monthly viewers, more than eighty percent of them not asian, which surprised the industry considerably more than it surprised the viewers. two years on the figure was around eight million a month, weighted heavily toward women between eighteen and thirty-four. deals with all three major south korean broadcasters plus seventy-odd other content partners gave it a catalog above fifteen thousand episodes.

the money followed the numbers. the founders raised about twelve million dollars before softbank bought the service outright in october 2014 for roughly a hundred million, and warner bros. took it off softbank's hands on 23 february 2016 as the opening move of a streaming strategy that also produced filmstruck.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the license actually bought ~

the product was never the video. korean broadcasters were already putting their dramas out; what dramafever sold was the gap between an episode airing in seoul and a watchable english version existing, which it closed to somewhere near the same day. professional subtitling on that schedule is expensive and invisible, and it is the reason people paid rather than waiting for a fansub that might arrive in a week with half the honorifics mangled.

it also built the apparatus of a real fandom around itself. the dramafever awards ran from february 2013, voted on by subscribers, and by the fifth edition the ballot was pulling more than three million votes from around the world. a toyota-sponsored ceremony at the hudson theatre in new york for the third one, in february 2015, is about as far as a subtitle service can get from where it started.

~ two owners in four years ~

softbank's hundred million looked like a bet on asian content flowing west, and for about eighteen months it was. then warner bros. bought it, and dramafever stopped being a company with a niche and became a line item inside warner bros. digital networks, sitting next to filmstruck and dc universe as one of three genre services the studio was standing up at once.

what changed underneath was the price of the catalog. a top korean drama that had cost around eight hundred thousand dollars to license for streaming was going for something near a million a season by 2018, because netflix and amazon had decided international content was worth outbidding everyone for. a service that sells one genre cannot outbid a service that sells all of them.

~ the sixteenth of october ~

there was no notice. on 16 october 2018 the site became a page reading "thank you for nine great years," subscribers were told an email about refunds would arrive in the following days, and the statement blamed business reasons and the rapidly changing marketplace for k-drama content. about a fifth of the new york staff were let go, with most of the rest absorbed into warner bros. digital labs. ten days later warner announced that filmstruck was going too.

the following march a former dramafever executive sued warner bros., alleging that the decision to close the service had been driven by discrimination against its asian-american leadership. warner rejected the claim. what is not in dispute is that a nine-year catalog of licensed subtitles vanished on a tuesday, and that every one of those episodes still exists in korean.

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