Presently able only to receive its own government channels, North Korean television viewers are set to receive broadcasts from the South in 2012.

The move is planned by a private South Korean group with plans to beam satellite entertainment television programmes into the communist north.

An alterative to the news, movies and documentaries broadcast by the North Korean state, Unification TV will offer South Korean dramas and other entertainment programming.

With relations between the two Koreas frozen for 60 years, Chairman of Korean Peninsula Vision and Unification, Bong Doo-wan, says the timing is right. He believes that the South Korean public wants ethnic unification to proceed with political unification – and that broadcasting has a useful part to play in achieving this. The station’s founders say the programming they will air should be ‘neutral and inoffensive’ to Pyongyang and Seoul.

The move can be set against the Korean Wave – the flood of Korean TV drama, movies, animation and music that washed across Asia a few years ago. Shows such as the KBS-produced TV drama series Winter Sonata (Gyeoul Yeonga) found popularity first in Japan and then more widely around the region when they began to appear in 2002. Other productions made by KBS such as Yoon Seok-ho’s Autumn In My Heart (Ga-eul-dong-hwa, 2000) and the series Sorry, I Love You (Mi-an-ha-da, sa-lang-han-da, 2004), paved the way for the broader uptake of South Korean programming, manhwa and other cultural exports.

Significantly, it was the strength of South Korea’s economy (then the tenth largest in the world at the time) that enabled its entertainment companies to finance shows and movies with production values higher than in much of Asia, and this was reflected in their subsequent popularity.

Unification TV founders need to raise US$46m from private backers and the government for the launch, but there is presently no indication that the South Korean Government is ready to provide funding.