IPTV (Image courtesy of Yonhap)
SEOUL, May 21 (Korea Bizwire) — KT Corp. announced Wednesday that it will join forces with SK Broadband and LG Uplus to launch a unified IPTV viewer data platform by the end of the year, aiming to provide more precise and representative audience metrics than traditional TV ratings systems.
The platform will aggregate anonymized viewing logs from set-top boxes (STBs) of subscribers across all 17 provinces in South Korea. It will offer granular insights such as reach (viewers who watched for more than 10 seconds), average viewing time, and viewership share — surpassing the limitations of conventional ratings, which rely on small-sample panel surveys involving only about 4,000 households out of the nation’s 36 million pay-TV subscribers.
KT, which commands 14 million IPTV subscribers, has already begun leveraging viewership data for services targeting home shopping networks and mid-sized broadcasting program providers (PPs).
In March 2025, the company signed a partnership agreement with 12 major home shopping companies, providing them with real-time insights via its “Genie TV Shopping Insight” (GSI) platform. These insights are being used in areas ranging from product planning and programming to production and marketing.
Later this year, KT plans to upgrade the GSI platform with an AI-powered chatbot assistant and predictive analytics that forecast viewer behavior. In January, KT also launched “TV Ad Index” in collaboration with mobile data firm IGAWorks, allowing advertisers to evaluate the impact of TV ads with the granularity of digital campaign metrics.
Beyond these services, KT has operated a media data web platform since July 2024. At the end of last year, it introduced an AI-based viewership prediction model designed to assess the potential popularity of live broadcast content before airtime.
With the upcoming integration of IPTV data across the country’s top providers, KT and its partners hope to usher in a new standard for audience measurement in South Korea’s evolving media landscape.
Kevin Lee (kevinlee@koreabizwire.com)
