SK Broadband is pushing into the offline advertising market with a digital signage service built on IPTV set-top boxes, branded B tv On-Ad (On-Ad). The company is pitching a subscription model priced in the 10,000-won range per month, aiming to lower barriers in a market long dominated by expensive equipment and to tap demand for what it calls space-based marketing.
“Digital out-of-home advertising has become part of daily life, but the key now is not simple exposure — it’s how much you raise the value of the time customers stay,” Ryu Jong-in, head of SK Broadband’s channel planning team, said in an interview April 29 at the company’s headquarters in central Seoul. “On-Ad is a service that turns that dwell time into data.”
According to the Korea Local Finance Association’s “2025 Outdoor Advertising Statistics,” South Korea’s outdoor advertising market totaled 4.6241 trillion won in 2024, with digital advertising accounting for 1.6634 trillion won. The market, once centered on paper ads and basic video playback, is rapidly shifting toward data-driven models.
On-Ad runs on IPTV infrastructure and can be used with a business-to-business set-top box, allowing operations without building separate servers or encoders.
“In the past, each store needed computer infrastructure and separate management, but now a single set-top box can centrally manage displays,” Ryu said. He cited the ability to start at about 13,000 won a month without upfront equipment investment of 100,000 to 150,000 won as the service’s biggest differentiator.
A key feature is artificial intelligence-based data analysis. Using a webcam, the system analyzes viewing angles and gaze time and includes functions that estimate gender and age group.
“We extract statistical values such as the age group of customers looking at the camera — for example, ‘women in their 20s’ — and use them for data analysis,” Ryu said. He added that tailored advertising based on gender and age could become possible.
SK Broadband is also considering adding content-optimization tools, including upscaling low-resolution video and automatically adjusting content for special aspect ratios such as 32:9 used in subways and buses, as well as vertical mobile formats. Ryu said development is complete and the company is reviewing applying it to On-Ad.
The service has been adopted by a domestic health-and-beauty store chain, which SK Broadband said demonstrated its practicality in retail operations. At Chung-Ang University’s Da Vinci Campus in Anseong, On-Ad was used in a project to digitize department bulletin boards. More recently, the service was installed at Hyundai Motor’s Bluehands repair shops. Ryu said On-Ad has grown by more than twofold each year since launch and that the company is targeting 100% growth this year.
Ryu said hospitals and universities are priority areas for expansion. He said the company aims to help hospitals replace paper leaflet point-of-purchase advertising with displays for more efficient operations.
SK Broadband is also reviewing generative AI-based content creation. Ryu said the company expects an environment where small business owners can enter prompts to produce ad images or videos and air them immediately, adding that the market structure could change significantly within two to three years.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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