LG U+, ‘Idol Plus’ closes and focuses on fan community

LG Uplus to end mobile app at the end of the month after IPTV
Focusing on fan community with ‘Digus’ LG Uplus’ K-pop content platform ‘Idol Plus’ will completely shut down its service. Following the discontinuation of its own IPTV service U+tv last year, the mobile service will also operate only until the end of this month. Instead of the content-focused Idol Plus, it will target the fandom market with the fan community platform ‘Digus’. According to the telecommunications industry on the 4th, LG Uplus’ K-pop platform Idol Plus will end its mobile service on the 30th. The service, which included video, images, and text postings, will be terminated, and the rights to all purchased content will expire. The content created by Idol Plus will be available through the mobile IPTV service ‘U+ Mobile TV’, and some paid contents like concert VOD will transfer individual rights. In 2018, LG Uplus launched ‘U+ Idol Live’ and ventured into the K-pop content market. Starting with various content live broadcasts, it introduced various services for K-pop fans. It also provided self-produced contents such as services to view stages from favorite members and specific angles, as well as ‘Idol Workshop’, ‘Idol School’, ‘Quest’, and more. In August 2022, it changed its name to Idol Plus and actively targeted high-popularity overseas K-pop markets. It released web services supporting English, Chinese, Japanese, and introduced original contents including extended reality (XR) to differentiate itself. Despite these efforts, the number of Idol Plus users continued to decrease. According to AI Works Marketing Cloud, the average monthly active users of Idol Plus over the past year was about 78,000. Considering that the monthly active users in 2022 reached the 200,000 range, the number has decreased to less than half in two years. LG Uplus reevaluated its business by discontinuing the Idol Plus service within IPTV last year and downsizing the development and operating organization. LG Uplus is targeting the fan platform market with the fan community-oriented platform Digus, released on the 8th of last month. Digus is a newly coined term combining ‘digging,’ meaning an act of digging deep into an area of interest, and ‘us’ meaning ‘ours’. Digus shifts its focus to fan community functions rather than self-content or broadcasts and plans to broaden its field to include sports and TV programs. LG Uplus has also transferred one of the key services provided by Idol Plus, the pre-voting feature for SBS music ranking program ‘Inkigayo,’ to Digus. An official from LG Uplus said, “Please think of it as the disappearance of the name Idol Plus and its replacement with the app Digus,” adding, “We are considering various ways to expand Digus as a fan community platform through diverse means such as content”.