TU Media (TU미디어)

» see tu4u.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The plan was literal. You put a spacecraft in orbit and sell handsets with a receiver in them, and then people watch live television on a screen the size of a playing card while riding the subway. TU Media Corp was incorporated in December 2003 as an SK Telecom subsidiary to do precisely that, running satellite digital multimedia broadcasting for South Korea. The satellite, MBSat 1, also called Hanbyul, went up on 13 March 2004. TU Media got its license that December, held an opening ceremony in April 2005 and started broadcasting for money on 1 May 2005.

The venture had a second country in it from the beginning. TU Media had signed a cooperation deal with Japan's Mobile Broadcasting Corporation in October 2002 and settled frequency coordination with Japan in September 2003, and the same spacecraft carried a separate beam for the Japanese service MobaHO!, which has its own grave here. Two countries, one satellite, two subscriber bases that both evaporated for closely related reasons.

The Korean side sold well at first. A million subscribers by December 2006, 1.26 million by September 2007, then 2.03 million by November 2009. The lineup ran to roughly thirty video channels and sixteen audio ones, mixing the Korean news networks and tvN with CNN and BBC World News, and sorting the music by genre down to a trot channel and a golden-oldies pop channel billed under its DJ's name. There was a car product too, TU Ride On, which bundled the satellite feed with traffic data for dashboards.

None of this survived contact with the smartphone. Mobile broadcast television answered a question that stopped being a question once a handset could pull video over the cellular network on demand, and the subscriber base fell from 2.05 million at peak to 39,000. SK Telink submitted a plan to abolish the business on 2 July 2012. The regulator accepted the filing three days later, and the satellite DMB signal stopped on 31 August 2012.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the brand died first ~

TU Media the company did not make it to the end of TU Media the service. In November 2010 it was merged into SK Telink, another SK subsidiary, and the Korean Wikipedia files it under companies dissolved in 2010 for exactly that reason. The name stayed on the product and the channel lineup for nearly two more years while the corporate entity behind it no longer existed.

So the paperwork that killed Korean satellite DMB never mentions TU Media at all. The July 2012 trade coverage of the closure filing names SK Telink as the applicant and the Korea Communications Commission as the body accepting it. Anyone searching the shutdown under the brand everybody actually remembers finds nothing, which is a recurring hazard with graves whose last two years were spent inside somebody else's balance sheet.

~ what it cost ~

Korean trade press covering the filing reported a loss of 330 billion won on the satellite DMB business for 2011, against 115 billion won of debt. The money had been going out for a long time before that. In April 2008 the Korean business press was already running the question as a headline, asking whether satellite DMB, having just been given an emergency transfusion, could recover at all.

Which puts the subscriber peak of late 2009 in a harsher light. It arrived in the same month the iPhone went on sale in South Korea, so the high-water mark of Korean satellite broadcasting to handsets and the arrival of the device that made it pointless are dated to within a few weeks of each other.

~ the day it died ~

The regulator did not just approve the shutdown. It ordered SK Telink to stop taking new subscribers immediately and to pay every remaining subscriber 10,000 won in cash as compensation for the viewing rights they were losing, with the payments running from September 2012 through February 2013. Roughly ten dollars a head, for the end of a service built on a spacecraft.

Mobile broadcast television never arrived in Turkey as something you could buy, so this whole product generation is one I only ever read about: we went from no mobile TV at all to watching video over 3G, skipping the satellite step entirely. tu4u.com resolves today, which is the kind of detail that looks like life until you read the body. It serves a parking placeholder whose own script writes the words "No advertisers available" into the page.

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