Nowcom

Nowcom
Nowcom
Type Public (KRX: 026330)
Industry Content Delivery Network, Video game industry, Media industry
Founded 1994
Headquarters Gyeonggi-do, Republic of Korea
Key people ex-CEO Yong-sik Moon[1]
Products Afreeca, TalesRunner, O2Jam, ClubBox, Nownuri
Employees 300
Website http://www.nowcom.co.kr

Nowcom (KRX: 026330) founded in 1994, is a Korean IT Company.

The first service of Nowcom in South Korea was Nownuri which is VT-based online BBS started in 1994 and currently they operates Afreeca, TalesRunner, O2Jam and ClubBox as well as Nownuri.

Nowcom was merged by Wins Technet, a listed IT company, at January 2008 and listed on KOSDAQ with its original name though and worked together for 3 years, but finally they have been separated again to two companies as they were. Nowcom is still listed on KOSDAQ.

Contents

Services

  • Afreeca: Online TV with P2P video streaming service. Users can upload their own videos as well as live video streams.[2]
  • TalesRunner: Racing video game
  • O2Jam: Music video game
  • ClubBox: Web storage service for any internet community
  • Nownuri: Classic VT BBS
  • NOWCDN: CDN service for massive file distribution such as game clients

Suspicion of illegal file distribution and the CEO under arrest

The ex-CEO, Yong-sik Moon, was arrested in 2008 for illegally distributing pirated films. The prosecution announced that Nowcom allowed users implicitly to distribute duplicated films and shared profits with major file uploaders in Clubbox. However Nowcom denied the suspicion announcing that they did nothing against the copyright law but everything to get rid of illegal uploads with filtering and monitoring as much as possible. More than that, Nowcom suspected Korean government that they arrested Moon intentionally with political purposes to make weak their service Afreeca which was lively broadcasting the protest held by people who were negative to US beef imports in South Korea.[3]

For this situation, "Nowcom has taken a major role in the internet business in South Korea and scaled down their suspicious services enough to protect the copyright against their profit", Korean Internet Contents Unity, as known as KICU, said, "We are sorry very much that the judiciary was too strict for this unlike usual cases". The CEO bonded out in a month after the arrest.

References

  1. ^ "Shinsegae, Nowcom heads face off on Twitter" (Press release). The Korea Herald. 2010-10-31. http://www.koreaherald.com/business/Detail.jsp?newsMLId=20101031000262. Retrieved 2011-01-14. 
  2. ^ Limb Jae-un (24 October 2006). "Online broadcasters share their passion with viewers". Joongang Daily. http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2832563. Retrieved 22 September 2009. 
  3. ^ Jung Hyo-sik, Lee Min-a (18 June 2008). "Afreeca head accused of pirating". Joongang Daily. http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2891255. Retrieved 22 September 2009. 

External links


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