Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: What Squid Game’s success means for niche and AVOD streamers, and why the former CEO of Oculus is getting the band back together.

How Squid Game changed the game for niche streaming

Tomorrow is going to be a momentous day for Netflix: The streamer is set to release the third and final season of Squid Game, closing the chapter on a success story of stunning proportions: 

Four years after its debut, the first season of Squid Game remains Netflix’s most popular TV show to date, while the second season is Netflix’s third-most popular show. Together, the first two seasons of Squid Game have garnered close to 600 million views to date.

That’s a number worth bragging about, and Netflix did just that in a blog post this week that also highlighted the show’s broader cultural impact: Not only was Squid Game huge on social (19.5 billion social media impressions, according to the company), it also led to a surge in interest in Squid Game-inspired clothing, products and even the Korean language itself (the number of people looking to learn Korean on Doulingo grew by 40% after the first season).

Granted, Squid Game did not happen in a vacuum. Interest in K-Pop and K-Beauty had already been surging, thanks largely to social media, and Parasite had captured the world by storm two years prior. But the show undoubtedly proved that there was a massive global audience for South Korean content on streaming, prompting both Netflix itself and others to lean in heavily.

The results speak for themselves: Netflix subscribers watched more than four billion hours of South Korean movies and TV shows in the second half of 2024 alone, according to data I was able to gather from the streamer’s latest global viewing data dump. The first two seasons of Squid Game accounted for less than 20% of that.

This all made me wonder: What is Squid Game’s effect on the broader streaming landscape, including ad-supported video? And how does the growing interest in Korean content change the game for smaller streamers looking to carve out a niche next to giants like Netflix?

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