South Korea, Japan showing way forward for media production in Asia

Football Federation Australia have plenty on their plate right now but could do worse than keep an eye on developments in Seoul and Tokyo.

In life as in football, timing is everything and with the eyes of the football world tuning into South Korean football, the K League must have been happy that they have their brand spanking new media production centre back at football headquarters.

Seoul have followed Tokyo, who opened theirs just over a year ago, in having state-of-the-art broadcast and production facilities that help make their visual product as high quality as possible.

As is often the case on the pitch, the two East Asian nations are leading the way.

Around three million people around the world on Twitter and YouTube alone watched Jeonbuk Motors defeat Suwon Bluewings 1-0 on May 8, the biggest competitive game of football since the coronavirus brought the beautiful game to a halt.

It was a perfect - though nervous - opportunity for the K League to get its new facility springing into action.

Within moments of any meaningful developments on the pitch, the K League was sending packaged highlights with uniform graphics - as well as English commentary - to its 36 rights holders all over the world.

The new media production centre opened in March, the result of the K League wanting more control over the content produced, to ensure a higher quality of production and also to make sure that all the action was archived as well as could be.

After spending time at the Bundesliga’s production facility in Cologne, as well as in Japan’s, there were discussions about whether it was worth the A$1.3 million investment needed.

In the end however, the decision to go ahead was unanimous.

“It was not built for generating profit in the short-term but investment for the long-term value of K League content,” Sa Doo-jin, the K League’s Broadcasting Rights Manager, told The World Game.

“There are two reasons why we opened the facility,” Sa added. “The first one is to deliver signals to OTT platforms or international broadcasters in an integrated system.

"Also, the importance of archived materials are becoming higher than before. We wanted to develop a system storing every match feed with high resolution.”

At the moment, Korean cable broadcasters JTBC send the feed from the top tier games with the K League itself doing the same from the second division.

“The media centre collects the feeds from each stadium by optical fibre,” Sa said. “Then, we add graphics and commentary and then we send signals to our rights holders by fibre, satellite and Amazon web service (cloud server).”

Now, the K League is having to field plenty of enquiries from other leagues around the world.

“Some countries have asked about sport livestreaming through a cloud server and domestically here, other sport federations have also shown interest in building up their own media centres," Sa said.

While others may follow South Korea, they have already followed Japan.

The J.League opened its digital content hub in March 2019.

International stars such as Andres Iniesta, Lukas Podolski and Thailand’s Chanathip Songkrasin have created an opportunity to develop its content production in the aim of boosting revenue from overseas sales on the back of more localised content.

“Remarkable advances in technology have created a strong need for images and data, and there is a need to provide them in a variety of forms, rather than in a uniform manner,” J.League chairman Mitsuru Murai said.

“Also, the success of Chanathip and Iniesta has increased demand for J.League video not only in Japan but also in other Asian countries, Europe and the United States.”