On Monday, Oct. 31, South Korean live streaming app V Live notified users that it'd be shutting down on Dec. 31, 2022. The closure isn't a surprise — in March, HYBE, owner of the competing app Weverse, announced it had acquired V Live and intended to close the app — but it is a bummer for artists and fans. V Live is the largest-ever archive of live-streamed K-pop content. Where will that content live on when the app goes dark?
Owned by Naver, V Live launched in 2015 as a tool for Korean artists to connect with fans. They did that primarily through live streams, which were then saved in the app as on-demand videos. As K-pop exploded in global popularity, V Live connected these entertainers with an international audience who watched them eat meals, celebrate birthdays, and produce music in real time.
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V Live streams were popular, drawing hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of viewers. It was a primary communication tool for many groups but especially for BTS, who hosted their popular series Run BTS! exclusively on the platform from 2015 to 2020. In total, BTS has uploaded over 860 videos to their V Live channel, acquiring more than 12 billion likes and 2 billion comments.
In March, HYBE — the media conglomerate that manages BTS, as well as major artists like Seventeen, Tomorrow X Together, and ZICO — announced that it intended to integrate V Live with its home-grown fan communication platform Weverse.
That was a wholly competitive move. Though Weverse is the most comprehensive fan communication app on the market, half of the industry still uses competitors Universe and Bubble.
But nearly every single artist used V Live to stream, some even weekly.
Yesterday, V Live said any artist who joined Weverse before Dec. 31, 2022 would have their content transferred to the app. Fans were worried. What would happen to the content of groups who didn't join Weverse?
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In a comment to Mashable, a Weverse representative assured that artists and their companies have been given ample time to download their archives for future use elsewhere. "We have consistently informed channel operators... with full information on content backup and download for about a year," since November 2021, they said.
"We are in the process of executing content migration to Weverse," they added, "and [are] planning to complete the process by Dec. 28, 2022... Following the integration, non-Weverse artists’ contents will no longer be accessible to the public." That means the content belonging to non-Weverse artists — which, in some cases, is hundreds of hours of streams — may disappear as early as Dec. 28 of this year before the app itself vanishes after the 31st.
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We asked the representative if an artist who decides to join Weverse after the closure of V Live would find an archive of their past V Live content available in Weverse. They replied, "Artists who have decided to join Weverse so far will be able to transfer their contents to Weverse," but didn't say if artists who joined after the closure would have their content transferred, too.
Since August, Weverse artists like Tomorrow X Together, Seventeen, and Enhypen have streamed exclusively on the platform ahead of the closure of V Live. Weverse attempted to launch a live streaming service of its own in early 2022, but fans complained it was buggy. Its acquisition of V Live in March was seen as an investment in making that feature better.
V Live "has long been the go-to platform for real-time communication between artists and fans," said the Weverse representative, and its integration will enable Weverse to "continue to evolve as a global fandom life platform."
