new apples

i poked around for some info about iple using naver.

dunno why i didn't think to do that before-- surely the main search engine of korea would have more information about it. and it... did? sort of? not as much as one would've hoped, but there were a few articles from 2009 that detailed various business things going on with it.

first up: it was solely operated by sm. after sm online merged with iple's parent company, iple was set to release in july 2007. their original company was like, a big company for music sharing and video entertainment. thus, iple was more of a hub from sm fandoms and content, rather than any idols or the big three. and as you can assume from the original company being big in video-sharing, the exclusive video content was the main draw. through the article i found, it was also confirmed that iple was specifically meant to help spread their artists around the world further. i know it was just a business thing, but i appreciate the thought, still.

i also finally found an article that explains all the functions of iple in detail. according to the article, it says that iple allows users to access and partake in: istyle (like minihomepys), messaging, fan cafés, and official idol content, including real-time broadcasts!!! it also has something called global ucc audition, which allowed english-, korean-, japanese-, and chinese-speaking users to audition for sm. i wonder if any sm idols we have now auditioned through iple. 

also! we got a description for what the candy shop was. they had two stores: one was for istyle decoration things, as previously noted, but the candy shop was where you could exchange candy for fan meeting and concert invitations. dunno how you got candy, though. maybe you had to pay for that, too.

all the content accessed through iple could be used without fear of copyright infringement. after all, they were still in that era where stuff was taken down a whole bunch on other platforms, such as youtube, and downloads reigned supreme... so, i guess you could say that iple was a bit of a saving grace for fandom folks outside of korea.

they also had some sort of telecom partnership service. the article explaining what it is and what users can get or access isn't clear, though. they could ring a number and then get. something. i originally thought they were referring to an app that iple had-- which i guess wasn't out of the picture, either-- since it was talking about ring tones and text tones. but then they went on to explain some sort of event that was going on, in which you called the number that i thought the app was named, so...

it's interesting that there was even this event and telecom partnership to begin with, though. in early 2009, sm online's various video services (including iple aura) were down. this was due to a bunch of layoffs that occurred in sm online, which left only few workers to maintain servers and databases. i wonder if this article is only speculation, though, since the article is somewhat informal and lacks references. at the same time, it was in the period of the recession, so it's not entirely out of the question that various services or projects were put on hold or facing uncertain futures.

but there's no news on it after 2009. was iple really only around for two years? who's to say...

also, nara's connection of it to bubble and weverse is really apt! especially now that we know they also did live broadcasts. i wonder if it would've eventually become that, if it stayed around past 2009.

hm... doing a deeper dive on iple was pretty fun. would you guys want to read about the everysing or genie apps that sm promoted all the time in their older music videos? it might be interesting...

sotd: let's go by matt & kim