Kakao TV

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

~ the eulogy ~

Korea is one of the few countries where YouTube ever had to fight for the video market. It had local competition with money behind it, and Kakao TV was the piece of that competition attached to the messenger almost everyone in the country used daily. KakaoTalk was never on my phone. Turkey went from MSN to WhatsApp without passing through the years when the national chat app also tried to be the national television.

It opened on 16 June 2015 as Kakao's own video service, wired into KakaoTalk and into the Daum portal. The pitch was ordinary and reasonable: paste a clip into a chat and it plays inside the chat, no jump to another app. The show that made the name was MBC's My Little Television, which broadcast on television and streamed live on Kakao TV at the same time, so the comments and the vote counts arrived in the same place as the show. In 2017 the live broadcasting side of Daum tvPot was folded in, which is why Korean coverage of the closure counted nine years instead of eleven.

The serious attempt came in September 2020. Kakao relaunched it as an original-content service with dramas cut short and shot vertical for a phone held in one hand, Lovestruck in the City being the one that traveled. The numbers looked like a start: 13 million views in the first week, 106 million within three months, 3.07 million members by 21 September 2020. Those are respectable figures for a launch and modest figures for a national video platform.

The trouble was that Kakao TV was never anybody's destination. It was the place a link resolved to when a friend sent it, which is a fine way to accumulate views and a poor way to accumulate a habit. YouTube had the habit. What Kakao owned was distribution into a chat window, and distribution turns out to be the cheapest thing to replace.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was for ~

A messenger with near-total national coverage looks like the perfect place to launch a video service, and companies keep believing it. LINE did it in Japan and Taiwan. Tencent did it in China. The logic is that if the audience is already inside the app, the video only has to be good enough. What actually happens is that people watch inside the messenger and subscribe on YouTube, because subscription is where the relationship with a creator lives, and no messenger managed to move that part.

By the end Kakao TV had no advantage left on any side of the market. YouTube held the uploads and the creator relationships. The live audience sat with SOOP, which is what AfreecaTV renamed itself, and increasingly with Naver's Chzzk, which arrived late and had a portal pushing it. Kakao's shutdown notice named none of them and said the content market had changed rapidly.

~ the retreat ~

The ending was staged over more than two years and every step was public. The standalone mobile app went away in February 2024. Comments under video-on-demand were removed in July 2024. Live chat, the thing that made My Little Television work in the first place, was switched off in August 2025. By then the service was a page you landed on rather than a product anybody opened.

~ the day it died ~

Kakao announced the closure on 5 March 2026 and gave creators most of four months to pull their files out through the video station menu. New channels and new uploads stopped on 1 June. The service ended on 30 June 2026, and the site was gone in the early hours of 1 July. Eleven years of uploads left the internet on a schedule, which is the polite version of this and still leaves everyone who never opened the backup page with nothing.

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