Asia News: BookMyShow Develops Online Platform, International Artists Begin Returning To South Korea

BookMyShow, the India-based company that calls itself the “one-stop shop for every out-of-home entertainment need,” announced that it is launching an online streaming platform for live entertainment called BookMyShow Online. The new feature is a direct response to the COVID-19 crisis circling the world and provides house-bound Indians with entertainment from the outside world of live performance. 

Though targeted at Indians, the platform will be made available to customers in the U.S. and Canada, the UK, Germany, United Arab Emirates, Southeast Asia and the West Indies. 

According to Best Media Info the new feature has already hosted more than 30 events and is now set to present its first ever “virtual music festival” with the Sunburn Home Festival, a virtual edition of Asia’s biggest electronic dance music festival, featuring top DJs from around the world using avatars, 3D animation and special effects. The performances will only be available to customers of BookMyShow Online. 

The co-founder and director of BookMyShow, Parikshit Dar, told Best Media Info, “Innovation has always been at the core of BookMyShow, riding on the strength of our product platform, technological expertise and data analytics to enhance the experience of millions of consumers. 

Sensing the shift in our users’ appetite for entertainment during this lockdown, we were agile enough to change tack by introducing virutal in-home entertainment offerings in India and other global markets. Our latest video streaming platform, BookMyShow Online, was born out of this need to make virtual live entertainment a frictionless and hassle-free viewing experience.”

BookMyShow works with Brightcove, a video technology platform, for BookMyShow Online. Brightcove’s technology allows BookMyShow Online to deliver a reliable, high quality streaming experience that can scale easily to audience size even as it increases. 

As South Korea continues to open up following months of lockdown owing to the virus crisis, foreign artists are slowly trickling in to perform, despite the fact that there are still restrictions in place for entry to the country, and that means any artist must arrive at least two weeks prior to their performance and go through quarantine. 

A case in point was Massimo Zanetti, the Italian music director of the Gyeonggi Philharmonic Orchestra, which is set for a series of concerts in mid-July. According to the Korea Herald, the maestro recently arrived in South Korea and, after testing negative for COVID-19, is undergoing a two-week period of self-quarantine. The concerts, which will present Mozart and Beethoven, will take place in Seoul July 18 and 19.

Last May, the Finnish music director of the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Osmo Vanska, flew to South Korea from the U.S. and underwent a two-week quarantine period. The French opera director, Vincent Boussard, led a performance of “Manon” by the Korea National Opera on June 25 and 28 that was streamed online without an in-house audience, but Boussard was in attendance after self-isolating in a Seoul hotel for two weeks. 

Things will become even more interesting, and complicated, in September when an international touring company of the musical “Cats” performs in Seoul. There will be some 40 cast and staff members involved, and if matters continue as they are, all will need to self-quarantine before hitting the stage.

In South Korea broadcast TV is still one of the most effective and widely used media for music promotion. However, pop artists tend to appear on music programs without their labels signing contracts with the TV stations involved, which means the stations have complete control over the footage they shoot of the artists. 

Labels have always complained of this practice, especially in recent years, according to the Korea Herald, which says that TV stations regularly upload for-profit, edited footage of fancams taken from online platforms such as YouTube. Sometimes they even resell the re-edited footage to third parties without permission. 

For the YouTube videos themselves that contain music, the platform pays a set royalty rate to labels or distributors that may or may not trickle down to songwriters and others, but there is no similar profit-sharing scheme for TV show clips that typically rack up millions of views. 

On June 24, the Korean Music Content Association, the Korea Management Federation and the Korea Entertainment Producers Association filed a petition with the South Korean Fair Trade Commission “calling for a revision to the current unfair contract practices with TV stations.”

The secretary-general of the Korea Content Association, Choi Kwang-ho, told the Korea Herald, “The purpose of the petition is to set fairer business practices between broadcasting stations and K-pop labels.” The FTC has begun reviewing the matter with the country’s culture ministry and TV stations and says that it hopes to “finalize the details of the new contract rules” by the end of the year.