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The Korean Broadcasting Act imposes various ownership restrictions on cable operators to foster media pluralism and content diversity. These restrictions include a limitation on the number of franchise regions that a multiple system operator may own, a ceiling on foreign share-holding in a cable company, and entry regulation. This study empirically investigates the content diversity of cable operators under different ownership conditions. Using a sample of 100 cable companies, we find that the relationship between cable ownership structure and diversity is not clear. Descriptive statistics and mean difference tests suggest that all of the cable operators offer very similar programs, regardless of their ownership structure. The channel diversity of MSOs is not different from that of independent cable operators. Furthermore, we did not find any meaningful difference in channel diversity between regions with competition or monopolies, or between cable operators without foreign ownership and those with foreign ownership.
