KT is planning to beef up cooperation with overseas mobile carriers to have its smartphone-only music service app Genie be positioned as a global standard for music service in the upcoming years, said a key KT executive on Wednesday.

In an interview with The Korea Herald, Ahn Tae-hyo, executive vice president at the mobile data business unit at KT, stressed that Genie was a service that targeted the overseas markets from its brainstorming stage.

“With the launch of the service in 45 different nations, we have now become able to deliver Korean content to the fans abroad who are craving everything involving hallyu,” he said.

“While we’re planning to roll out the app service in additional countries, we will continuously work together with the major overseas telecoms to transform it into a global standard music service.”

As part of the scheme, it will establish corporate offices abroad, secure K-pop songs for the overseas audience and build the necessary network infrastructure in the supporting nations.

He also said that the service users could make use of the firm’s cloud computing service called “Ucloud” and store their purchased items there so that they could be downloaded to multiple devices.

Genie is a smartphone-only music service app but the purchased goods, such as music and videos, can be downloaded onto the buyer’s smartphone and personal computer as well as MP3 player through the cloud service, according to Ahn.

“We feel that this service is appealing to many people because they’re able to freely listen to the same song up to three times before making the final purchase,” he said. “There is also specialized content only available for Genie users. This indicates that people will find themselves recognizing the need to pay the according amount for valuable content.”

He added that the quality of the music content will improve with the introduction of a reasonable system like Genie, which he believes will ultimately add to the competitiveness of hallyu content.

By Cho Ji-hyun (sharon@heraldcorp.com)