Seezn (시즌)

~ the obituary ~

KT unveiled Seezn at a press briefing on 28 November 2019, and what it unveiled was a renaming. The company already had a mobile video app called olleh tv mobile, and this was that app reorganized under a shorter name, which is a distinction worth holding onto because the brand that died in 2022 was three years old while the service underneath it was considerably older. KT opened with more than 110 live channels and a claimed 200,000 VOD titles.

The marketing was all about the network. Seezn arrived in the first full year of Korean 5G and KT built the feature list to prove the network was worth paying for: ultra-HD with no resolution ceiling tied to your plan, and a low-latency mode that cut the delay to roughly one second against an IPTV broadcast. There was a premium sound mode and a scene search, alongside a face-reading search that claimed to track 109 points on your face to guess what you wanted to watch. Monthly plans ran from 5,500 won up to 13,200.

The flagship use of the latency work was baseball. KT aimed the one-second delay at KBO games and golf, then layered on pitch-analysis overlays and pitcher-versus-batter data. Post-season viewing came in up 48 percent year on year. A streaming product whose best argument is that you will see the pitch a second sooner than your neighbor is a product built for people who already care which Korean team is batting, and that is a fairly exact description of an audience I have never been in.

~ the case file ~

~ five percent of the market ~

Mobile Index numbers for January to September 2022 put the Korean streaming market in order. Netflix held 38.22 percent of monthly users, with Wavve and Tving next on 14.37 and 13.07. Seezn was on 4.98. In raw monthly users that was about 1.25 million people in October 2022, against 11.36 million for Netflix and 4.31 million for Tving.

KT did make its own shows, roughly 140 original titles counted cumulatively from 2018, including the army drama Shinbyeong and an office comedy adapted from the webtoon Gauss Electronics. Its first original film sold on to HBO and Viki, which is a genuine result for a carrier's side project. The originals were good enough to export and never enough to make a fourth-place app into a destination.

~ what KT took instead ~

The Tving board approved the merger on 14 July 2022 and the Korean competition regulator cleared it on 31 October. The structure was an absorption: Tving took in KT Seezn at a share ratio of one Tving share to 1.5737519 of KT Seezn, and KT Studio Genie, which owned KT Seezn, came out holding Tving stock as its third-largest shareholder. CJ ENM had already put 100 billion won into KT Studio Genie that March.

So KT exited the business of running a streaming service and entered the business of owning part of one that was winning. Tving's own framing, given to the Korean press, was about maximizing platform competitiveness and building growth momentum, which says nothing at all, and neither company published a sentence explaining why its own app had not worked.

~ the month after the merger ~

The wind-down followed a longer calendar than the merger did, and the press got the date wrong twice on the way through. An August 2022 report said the service would stop at midnight on 30 November, because the content licenses expired then. A late-October report said it would end the day before the merger. The first-party answer sits on a page Tving still hosts today, titled 시즌 서비스 종료 관련 FAQ, and it says the Seezn app remained usable until 31 December 2022.

Before that, the commercial side had already been dismantled in stages. New pass sign-ups and top-ups of the in-app currency, called koko, stopped on 1 November. Existing koko and paid purchases ran out on 30 November. Paid koko was refundable in full to the user's own bank account within seven to fourteen business days.

The accounts themselves got the harshest treatment. A Seezn ID could not be merged into an existing Tving ID, so anyone already using Tving had to register a second account from scratch. The FAQ states that the personal data transferred across to Tving would not be used and was scheduled for destruction, with purchase and refund records kept only as the law required. Films people had bought outright were moved into a different app again, Genie TV Mobile, which launched the following month. Today the ko.wikipedia entry for KT's video brand carries the line 지니 TV 플레이, and in brackets after it, the old name.

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