V LIVE

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

~ the goodbye ~

V LIVE was built for people who follow Korean pop groups closely enough to want them live at three in the morning. I have never been one of those people. By 2015 I was thirty one and working on computer vision in Ankara, which is about as far from that audience as you can stand while still being on the same internet.

Naver put it into beta on 1 August 2015 and opened the service properly on 1 September. The premise was simple enough that it is easy to forget how new it was: an artist presses a button in the app and is live to whoever happens to be watching, with no broadcaster in between and nothing scheduled. Comments ran up the side of the screen and the artist read them out.

The audience turned out to be somewhere else. By the end of 2017 the app had passed forty two million downloads and roughly eighty percent of the viewers were outside Korea. By December 2020 it was past a hundred million downloads with eighty five percent of visitors overseas. Naver had built a domestic product and been handed a global one, and the language gap got closed by the users themselves through V Fansubs, where volunteers wrote subtitles for broadcasts in whatever they spoke.

Everything I know about this platform I know from the outside, and that is worth saying plainly, because the reason V LIVE is worth a grave is not the streams. It is what happened to seven years of them.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

The broadcast itself was free. The money sat on top of it. V LIVE+ sold individual concerts and events for a currency called V coins, and Channel+ ran monthly subscriptions to a particular artist's private feed. In December 2018 they added the V Lightstick, a digital object that made your reactions count for more during a live show, which is an honest enough summary of what fandom monetization had become by then.

Naver already ran the largest portal in Korea, so the distribution was never the hard part. What V LIVE actually supplied was a direct line between an industry built on managed access and an audience that mostly did not live in the country producing it. The subtitles were volunteer labor and the enthusiasm cost nothing. The platform kept the recordings.

~ the merger ~

In January 2021 Naver and Big Hit, the BTS company that had just renamed itself HYBE, announced they would merge V LIVE into Weverse. Weverse was HYBE's own fan platform and the combined thing was meant to be one place instead of two. Naver took a stake in the Weverse company, and V LIVE was handed over on 2 March 2022.

The end date was announced on 31 October 2022. Users had until 11:59pm on 28 December to move memberships and unspent V coins across. The app stopped on 31 December 2022, seven years and four months after it opened.

~ what got buried with it ~

The migration covered artists who were on Weverse. Everybody else was not carried over. Seven years of streams from groups that had since disbanded and from artists whose agencies never signed with HYBE were deleted on the way out.

Fans archived what they could in the final weeks, which is the usual arrangement: the platform holds the only copy and then decides it no longer wants the storage. What made this one worse than most is that the material was live and unrepeatable to begin with. A group's broadcast on the night of a debut exists once. V LIVE was where those went, and for a large part of the catalog it was also where they stopped.

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