It's a like something out of a comic book. The dream of 'manga otakus' to collect all the manga in the world in one place has become a reality under the name of 'Laftel', the largest animation OTT platform in Korea. Laftel focused its efforts on the animation online streaming market, which has been slow to transition to digital due to the structural limitations of the existing industry and the prevalence of illegal sharing sites. Laftel believed in the power of animation as a vertical content, and in the power of the "righteous and dignified otakus" who would willingly come out of the shadows if the environment was right. They plowed through the cracks in the animation distribution structure and brought together content providers (CPs) who were otherwise competing with each other on a single platform. They created a "concrete fanbase" with marketing that included "kitschy" code interactivity aimed at animation's core audience, the 1020s. All of this was done with a small team and profitably.
In the Japanese boy's adventure manga ‘One Piece11Since Eiichiro Oda began serializing in 1997, as of December 31, 2014, approximately 320 million copies have been sold, earning him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the "most copies sold for a single author of a single comic series." Last year, the cumulative worldwide circulation exceeded 500 million copies, solidifying its position as a truly global cultural content.닫기’, which features pirates as its theme, there is an island called Laftel. It is the land where the world's greatest treasure, One Piece, sleeps and is the goal of the characters. The etymology is interesting. A key character in the story, who discovered the unknown treasure sleeping on the island, called it "Laftel" (Laugh Tale) because he thought it was "a very funny story. It's a grammatically awkward coinage, but at least in the world of One Piece, Laftel is an utopia that holds "all the treasure in the world.
The name of Korea's largest animation online video service (OTT) platform, Laftel, comes from this. It was founded with the ambition to create a treasure island of cartoons, where all the animations in the world are collected. In 2014, a group of manga lovers founded Laftel. At the time, their dream was a laughing matter, just like its etymology. OTT was already in its infancy in the general content space, but animation was still stuck in the confines of legacy media such as TV channels specializing in manga. The only other option was IPTV, and even then, it was difficult to watch unless the show you wanted was available on the IPTV service you subscribed to. Online, a realm of possibilities, was dominated by illegal sharing sites. The entire market was being vocalized by the illegal sites, which were the fastest to get the latest and hottest animation through an unusual process. The immediate perception was that animation = free.
This content was translated into English by AI (using DeepL) from an article that was originally written in Korean in the DBR (Donga Business Review). Therefore, please understand that there may be some awkward expressions.
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