CJ ENM Expands K-Dance on North American FAST With Hudson AI Dubbing

FAST · STREAMING DISTRIBUTION

CJ ENM fills a North American FAST channel with one dance franchise

CJ ENM K-Dance opens exclusively on LG Channels in the U.S. and Canada with 200+ hours of Street Woman Fighter, Street Man Fighter and Somebody; Hudson AI's consortium made the English and Spanish AI dubs

In brief  CJ ENM opened CJ ENM K-Dance on LG Channels in the U.S. and Canada on Oct. 27, running 200+ hours built around Street Woman Fighter. Hudson AI's consortium made the English and Spanish AI dubs under a government K-FAST scheme. It is CJ ENM's sixth FAST channel in North America.

CJ ENM launched CJ ENM K-Dance, a channel devoted to Korean dance, on LG Electronics' free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) service LG Channels on Oct. 27, exclusive to the U.S. and Canada. It is the first standalone channel CJ ENM has opened on LG Channels and brings its North American FAST lineup to six.

The channel runs more than 200 hours around the clock, built on Mnet's (엠넷) dance competition franchise Street Woman Fighter (스트릿 우먼 파이터). It is the first of CJ ENM's North American FAST channels to be filled from a single franchise, its spin-offs and digital clips rather than a genre such as drama or K-pop. On the U.S. LG Channels guide it sits at IP-855.

Language is the reason for dance. Park Eun-hye (박은혜), who heads new business for CJ ENM's content distribution unit, including FAST and AVOD, told StreamTV Insider in a written interview published Oct. 30that dance can be enjoyed across language and cultural barriers and followed without knowing the storyline, which suits scheduled FAST viewing. She also pointed to encouraging North American viewing for seasons featuring international crews.

The English and Spanish dubs came out of a government programme. Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT (과학기술정보통신부) and the Korea Association for ICT Promotion (KAIT, 한국정보통신진흥협회) in July picked a consortium led by Hudson AI (허드슨에이아이) for the second year of their AI-dubbing K-FAST scheme, under the channel name CJ ENM K-DANCE, with 230 million won (about $172,000) per flagship channel. Hudson AI is building the Spanish versions for viewers in Mexico and the U.S. Hispanic market.

With the launch, CJ ENM's North American FAST lineup now runs from drama and film, K-pop, reality, food and travel and Spanish-dubbed drama to dance. Park said that in 2027 the company will focus less on adding channels than on growing viewing time and ad revenue on those it has.

Street Woman Fighter, Street Man Fighter, Somebody: more than 200 hours of dance, around the clock

The channel is built from Mnet (엠넷) dance competitions Street Woman Fighter and Street Man Fighter (스트릿 맨 파이터), the dance dating reality Somebody (썸바디), the MPD FanCam series and top performances from the MAMA AWARDS. StreamTV Insider put the library at more than 200 hours. Between the full shows CJ ENM will add performance clips from STUDIO CHOOM (스튜디오 춤), made by its digital music studio M2, and videos from the franchise's official YouTube channels, and it will refresh the main lineup whenever a new season or new dance IP arrives.

"From the very beginning, we wanted to share with viewers around the world the beauty of Korean dance culture and the message that dance can express something deeper than words," Choi Jung-nam (최정남), the CJ ENM producer behind the franchise, said in the Oct. 27 press release. Choreographers Baek Gu-young (백구영) and Bada (바다) said they hoped viewers would enjoy "the fierce yet warm moments" in the shows.

Park's case for dance rests on language. "Dance is a particularly compelling genre for international audiences because it can be enjoyed intuitively, across language and cultural barriers," she said, adding that performances are "visually engaging even if someone has not followed the full storyline, which makes them a natural fit for linear FAST." She cited "encouraging viewing results" in North America for seasons featuring international crews. World of Street Woman Fighter, which aired from May to July 2025, had six crews and was won by Japan's Osaka Ojo Gang.

The LG exclusivity holds for now, but Park said Korean entertainment "still has significant room to reach new audiences in the US," and that reach matters more to CJ ENM than exclusivity, leaving room for K-Dance to move onto other platforms. LG Channels runs more than 5,000 channels in 37 countries as of July; in 2025 its monthly average viewers rose 30% and total viewing hours 45%.

Six channels from drama to dance, and in North America thrillers and dating reality travel

CJ ENM's North American FAST channels are K-Stories, K-Pop, K-Reality, K-Food & Travel, the Spanish-dubbed K-Novelas and K-Dance. It supplies The Roku Channel, Google TV and Samsung TV Plus, and in August added K-Stories and K-Pop to Amazon's Prime Video. Samsung carries five of the six, all but K-Dance, in 17 countries including the U.S. On the AVOD side, CJ ENM supplies Samsung TV Plus, The Roku Channel, Fox's Tubi and Prime Video, with AI-assisted English subtitles.

CJ ENM's North American FAST channels. Sources: StreamTV Insider, CJ ENM

Formats differ by channel. K-Pop runs more than 60 hours of clip-based programming cut from music videos and live stages and has consistently grown viewing time by more than 200% year on year in the U.S. When Samsung TV Plus carried the MAMA Awards live in 2024, viewing time on the channel passed three times its usual average and stayed elevated after the event.

"While romantic Korean dramas have attracted considerable attention on global subscription streaming services, our FAST and AVOD offerings have performed well with genre-driven series such as thrillers and crime dramas, recently aired Korean variety shows, and unscripted dating formats featuring everyday people," Park said. Of the dating show EXchange (환승연애), she said its stories "can resonate even with viewers who are not deeply familiar with Korean culture."

Dance itself has split into sub-formats. The Street Woman Fighter franchise spawned Street Man Fighter, Stage Fighter (2024), in which 64 Korean-dance, contemporary and ballet dancers competed, and World of Street Woman Fighter (2025) with foreign crews. Platforms are widening too: Samsung TV Plus recently added a short-form microdrama slate, weekly movie nights and competition shows to its Korean lineup. The government's second-year K-FAST programme set the genres of its new channels as vertical drama, K-beauty and K-dance, with ESTsoft (이스트소프트) running GENIE K-Short and TREND ON and UnAI (언에이아이) running K-Vibe+ alongside Hudson AI's CJ ENM K-DANCE.

Demand leaves room. Ampere Analysis found that about 45% of South Korea's on-demand titles are available only on domestic services, and named Korea as a market where exports have not kept pace with demand. Omdia's Maria Rua Aguete noted that Netflix has said 80% of its subscribers have watched Korean content, and Omdia found Korean titles drew 12.1 billion viewing hours on Netflix in a year. The science ministry, citing Statista, expects the global FAST market to grow from about 16 trillion won (about $12 billion) in 2025 to about 23 trillion won (about $17.2 billion) in 2030.

Hudson AI's consortium dubbed the shows; year one produced 1,200 titles and 100 million cumulative viewers

The K-FAST programme began in 2025 with 8 billion won (about $6 million) from a supplementary budget. Six consortia dubbed about 1,200 Korean titles, some 1,400 hours, into English, Spanish and Portuguese to build 20 channels, which began airing late last year on Samsung TV Plus and LG Channels in 22 countries including the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The science ministry said on July 9 that they had reached about 100 million cumulative viewers by the end of April, and that alliance membership had grown from 22 companies at launch to 82.

Members of the Global K-FAST Alliance. Source: Ministry of Science and ICT, KAIT

Hudson AI took part in year one as well. "We are working with CJ ENM in a consortium to dub 300 hours of dramas within three to four months," Hudson AI chief executive Shin Hyun-jin (신현진) told a ministry meeting in August 2025. Over that period it localised more than 400 hours of Korean drama with CJ ENM and LG Electronics for FAST channels in North America and Europe. This year it leads the K-Dance flagship with CJ ENM.

Park told StreamTV Insider that the programme gave CJ ENM practical experience producing AI-dubbed English and Spanish versions of selected Street Woman Fighter seasons, alongside English subtitles, for the new channel. It gives the company "more options for presenting the same IP across different languages and viewing preferences," she said, calling Spanish localisation "essential" alongside English. She named Brazil and France as markets where she would like to offer more local-language content. CJ ENM uses AI-assisted translation and subtitling with a final human review, and is testing AI dubbing on its FAST channels to narrow the gap between Korean broadcast and U.S. availability.

At TIFFCOM 2026 in Tokyo on Oct. 28-30, Hudson AI showed what it calls agentic dubbing, which tells apart more than 40 characters in a video, gives each its own voice and has an AI agent check every line. It also dubs Korean pro baseball (KBO) broadcasts live for viewers in the U.S., New Zealand and Australia.

In Cannes, K-dance led the talk as "a great potential" to win younger viewers

Hudson AI also presented its K-Dance work to European operators. At a closed-door roundtable at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes on Oct. 11, the day before MIPCOM opened, Shin Hyun-jin introduced Hudson AI as the lead of this year's CJ ENM K-Dance flagship consortium and demonstrated a drama dub that kept the actor's crying. K-EnterTech Hub, publisher of this site, hosted the roundtable.

"Everybody wants to win a younger audience, so it's a great potential for K-dance," said Inga Alika, who runs the media and streaming consultancy Alika Media and Tech in Riga, pointing to how hard European telcos and pay-TV operators find it to reach young viewers. Karina Rompa, a former Rakuten TV executive who founded the Warsaw consultancy Media Hansa, recalled K-pop dance crews crowding a Korean brand event in Warsaw and said K-pop concerts sell out every time. A free channel, she said, puts "no blocker" in front of viewers who have never seen Korean content.

Language was the condition raised for bringing K-dance to European channels. "Polish is not so small. Every language is not small," said Martyna Dobrzańska, head of partnerships at Warsaw TV agency Media Spurs, noting that selling to Polish partners requires a Polish version. Poland has about 300 pay-TV operators and Latvia about 70, and in Latvia a Russian dub can only air alongside a Latvian version. Alika said Korean content was the most pirated content in Latvia in 2019. Infrastructure is the other condition: many European telcos lack server-side ad insertion (SSAI) and cannot carry FAST channels, the participants said. Shin offered a ten-minute test dub in Latvian and Polish. LG Channels entered Poland in July, taking its service to 17 European countries.

Netflix marks 10 years in Korea; K-FAST reached 100 million viewers in 22 countries in its first year

Netflix launched in Korea in January 2016 and marks its 10th anniversary there this year. On Oct. 23 it opened an anniversary site saying 80% of its members worldwide have watched Korean content and that more than 200 Korean titles reached its global top 10 over the five years from 2021. Its Oct. 24-25 "Netflix Party" festival drew 3.59 million people online and offline. In the first half of this year, Korean titles took 11% of Netflix series viewing time, second only to the U.S.

Viewing at home is concentrated on the two U.S. platforms. In June, according to Mobile Index, Netflix had 16.17 million monthly active users in Korea, against 9.69 million for TVING (티빙), 8.85 million for Coupang Play (쿠팡플레이) and 3.97 million for Wavve (웨이브). WiseApp Retail found Koreans spent an average 113.6 billion minutes a month on YouTube from January to May, against 5.61 billion on Netflix. Most of the government's 39.9 billion won production-support budget for broadcast and streaming content goes into making titles. "Distribution and platform competitiveness need to be strengthened," Kim Ji-hyun (김지현), a researcher at the Korea Creative Content Agency (한국콘텐츠진흥원), told MTN (머니투데이방송) in July.

K-FAST is a different route. Korean companies own the channel brand and the schedule, and the channels air on Korean-made smart-TV platforms, Samsung TV Plus and LG Channels; the ministry cited a supply base of 600 million smart TVs worldwide when it launched the programme in 2025. CJ ENM's inventory split with select major platforms lets a content company deal directly with advertisers, and K-Dance builds a channel brand on a single franchise on top of that.

Support has shrunk since year one. The first year used an 8 billion won (about $6 million) supplementary budget, with about 1.2 billion won (about $900,000) per consortium for premium channels and about 210 million won (about $157,000) for flagship channels, to build 20 channels that reached 100 million cumulative viewers within five months. Year two funds three consortia and four channels at 230 million won each. The ministry's 2027 budget proposal assigns 9.42 trillion won (about $7.06 billion) to AI, but its release does not give a separate figure for K-FAST. "We will spare no support to build a sustainable K-FAST ecosystem," Nam Seok (남석), the ministry's director general for telecommunications policy, said in July.

The next tasks sit outside the current support. Growing viewing time and ad sales per channel, CJ ENM's goals for next year, and adding languages such as Polish and Latvian, which European operators asked for in Cannes, are not covered by one-year channel-building grants. Over the decade in which Netflix and YouTube widened global distribution and domestic viewing of Korean content, Korean companies rarely held a route where they owned both the channel and the ads. K-FAST opened one in a year; with results now on the board, government support needs to move from one-year build grants to multi-year funding for operations, local marketing and more languages.

After the launches, ad revenue: an inventory split with select major platforms

CJ ENM's North American FAST business has mostly run on revenue share, with platforms selling the ads and CJ ENM taking a cut. Park said that model supported early expansion but offered few chances to pitch its content's value directly to advertisers or raise the value of its ad products. This year it moved select major platforms to an inventory split and plans to grow direct ad sales through its U.S. subsidiary and ad sales team. It did not disclose the split.

CJ ENM is packaging FAST and AVOD with YouTube and Mnet+ (엠넷플러스), its global K-pop fan platform, into an integrated ad offering: FAST and AVOD build brand awareness on the TV screen, YouTube extends digital reach and Mnet+ draws active participation from fans. Mnet+ had 20 million monthly active users as of October 2025. "Connecting these different viewing and fandom experiences through our IP could offer advertisers marketing value that goes beyond ad impressions alone," Park said.

Data and placement are the friction points. Wurl chief executive Dave Bernath said in a StreamTV Show keynote this year that channel success can depend on whether platforms pull levers such as UI and EPG placement, sharing performance data and agreeing to certain revenue or inventory models. Park acknowledged that content providers do not always see the audience data platforms hold. CJ ENM compensates by scheduling shows featuring talent from titles trending on global streaming services and building themed lineups around U.S. seasonal and marketing moments. "Promotions on U.S. FAST services often center on familiar American television series and films or established library franchises," she said. "We would welcome more opportunities for Korean entertainment."

CJ ENM's move into direct sales follows a slide in domestic TV advertising. According to regulatory filings reported by Chungnyun Ilbo (청년일보), CJ ENM's TV ad revenue fell from 543.3 billion won (about $407 million) in 2021 to 333.6 billion won (about $250 million) in 2025, down 39%, and dropped 22.1% year on year to 53.7 billion won (about $40 million) in the first quarter of 2026. Waiting for a share of ads that platforms sell is a limited way to make up that ground.

Korean broadcasters face the same question. The first-year K-FAST channels mostly dubbed and re-aired existing libraries, and their ad income largely depends on a share of what platforms sell. The ministry says the second year will move beyond simple overseas retransmission to FAST originals, recent content and newer ad technology. CJ ENM made that step with a U.S. ad sales team, an inventory negotiation with platforms and AI localisation that lets it air shows soon after their Korean broadcast. Broadcasters without a U.S. ad sales arm are likely to stay on revenue share.

The 2027 goal is ad revenue, and flagship IP as channel brands

For 2027, Park said CJ ENM will focus less on channel count than on presence within platforms already carrying it, adding channels where appropriate and working with partners on discovery, scheduling and promotion to grow viewing hours per channel. "Our goal is to build partnerships in which stronger viewing performance for CJ ENM programming also contributes to engagement and advertising revenue for the platforms," she said. It also wants FAST partnerships around live K-pop concerts and awards shows.

The longer aim is channels built on single IP. "We would like our flagship franchises to become channel brands in their own right, creating opportunities for a more diverse portfolio of IP-led channels," Park said. K-Dance is the first to fill 24 hours from one franchise, its spin-offs and digital clips. "As viewing habits diversify beyond subscription streaming to FAST, AVOD, YouTube, and vertical short-form platforms, the ability to create and supply high-quality programming across a wide range of genres becomes a major competitive advantage," she said. The first test is when the Hudson AI consortium's Spanish dubs reach viewers in Mexico and the U.S. Hispanic market.