This book offers an outstanding analysis of how OTT (Over-The-Top) content reaches global audiences and the emotional codes at play within it, through the lens of Apple TV+’s adaptation of the global bestseller novel Pachinko. The book examines what OTT platforms are as media in the 21st-century popular culture landscape, distinct from traditional channel-based media, and how these platforms produce content. It further explores how the grammar of platforms and the media industry mutually shape each other, using the 2022 drama Pachinko as a case study. Pachinko serves as a prime example of both the expansion of the historical drama genre and the unique characteristics of OTT media that deliver such content.

The book delves into the media-specific traits of OTT platforms and emerging artistic trends, defining the world of reality that OTT dramas portray as “affective realism.” Affective realism is presented as an alternative concept to the emotional realism traditionally executed by TV. This book, with contributions from nine researchers, is divided into three parts: “Pachinko and OTT Reception Culture” (3 chapters), “Pachinko and OTT Content Engineering” (3 chapters), and “Pachinko and the Political Economy of OTT” (3 chapters). Readers will discover that OTT dramas like Pachinko, and OTT media in general, manifest a “universal emotional structure” distinct from the “dominant emotional structures” of traditional media, positioning OTT as a generator of diverse emotional experiences.