North Korea Unveils Netflix-Like Service With Propaganda on Demand
By Patrick Boehler and Choe Sang-Hun, NY Times, Aug. 25, 2016
HONG KONG--Days before North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, successfully tested a ballistic missile that he said could hit parts of the continental United States, his reclusive regime unveiled another technical triumph: a Netflix-like streaming service.
Called Manbang, the service delivers on-demand videos to televisions through a set-top box, Korean Central Television said in a report last week.
In the report, a narrator says that Manbang is further proof of North Korea’s “socialist cultural power,” which will allow its people to watch their country “make a leap forward every day, every hour.”
Very few of the country’s roughly 25 million citizens are permitted to access the actual internet. Content that can be streamed is largely restricted to state-run television and propaganda-filled movies.
According to the report, in addition to news reports and updates on Mr. Kim’s daily activities, Manbang also offers language courses in English and Russian.
Manbang was “elevating the people’s cultural life a step up by allowing them to watch what they want any time they want,” a man identified as Ju Dae-hyun, a telecommunications official in Sinuiju, a town near the Chinese border, said in the report.
And Kim Kum-hee, a kindergarten teacher in Sariwon, said that Manbang’s video-on-demand service resolved the headache of children clamoring to binge-watch their favorite movies. “Now they are glued to the TV screen for hours a day,” she said.
North Koreans rely on smuggled electronics to watch overseas media, anecdotal reports suggest. The government is trying to rein in the illegal use of Notetels, small Chinese-made media players that can read smuggled DVDs or USB sticks, Radio Free Asia has said.
Netflix, which began an aggressive global expansion plan this year, has taken note of its newest competitor. On Thursday, its American Twitter account description read “Manbang knockoff.”
