As a newbie to the K-drama phenomenon, the first one I watched on the recommendation of friends and family was Squid Games last year. The next thing I knew, the OTT platform I was on showed recommendations to several K-dramas and even similar shows in my local language. With new shows on my list, in Korean and local languages, I had fortunately bucked the 2021 trend of peak COVID boredom. I was making full use of my subscription expenses with new and highly relevant content areas to explore. AI was at play, and in ways that really addressed my needs as a consumer.

Over the Top (OTT) content distribution has changed the way video or audio content is consumed and it seems to stay for a while. Consumption of home entertainment via Internet-connected devices has increasingly become the trend for most people. Even though linear TV today continues to offer traditional TV packages along with OTT, viewing habits have shifted towards OTT-only content over the years. Studies suggest that if your platform is easily discoverable, if you have great content, if you offer an intuitive user experience, and if it is reasonably priced, people will subscribe and get hooked onto your OTT service. OTT customer acquisition and retention is quite a challenge, especially in a market with many players that offer original content, that are attractively priced, and that offer consistent user experience.

I took my first "business machines" class in high school in 1991, attended my first computer science class in 1994 (learning Pascal), and moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 after Cisco converted my internship into a permanent position. The eight I'm covering in this article include desktop operating systems, web browsers, networking, social networks, mobile apps, Internet of Things, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. In the social network space, development is completely centralized by the owners of the platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) A technology with a low barrier to entry and decentralized platform development has the greatest potential for future impact.