Samsung TVs to stream KCON LA 2026 free in 17 countries

Samsung doesn't need you to buy a concert ticket to watch KCON LA 2026. It needs you to own a Samsung TV. Starting 14 August, Samsung TV Plus will livestream the three-day K-pop festival free across 17 countries, no subscription or even a Samsung account required, in a move that looks generous but doubles as a well-aimed sales strategy for the company's television business.

KCON LA 2026

The show features artists performing live on the Toyota Music Den Stage and M Countdown Stage at Crypto.com Arena and LA Convention Center via the CJ ENM K-POP channel.

Broadcasts will be available for audiences in the US, UK, France, Germany, India, Thailand, and 11 other countries. The drawback here is the fact that Samsung TV Plus is embedded only into Samsung’s ecosystem of devices such as smart TVs, smart monitors, Family Hub refrigerators, and Galaxy phones.

SmartThings is integrated by Samsung to allow users to receive reminders and control lighting and sounds to recreate an atmosphere of a concert at home.

That's a deliberate pitch: the more useful and immersive Samsung's ecosystem feels during a global cultural moment like KCON, the harder it becomes for a viewer to justify buying a TV from anyone else.

Samsung's deputy head of its visual display service business, Gwiho Lee, justified the deal on the basis of fulfilling the demand for Korean entertainment; however, the actual rationale behind it is customer retention through exclusivity of the content offered.

Not just a one-time deal: Samsung TV Plus aired the 2024 MAMA Awards from Los Angeles and Osaka and a dedicated K-POP channel from Europe by CJ ENM in January 2025.

In fact, KCON has been taking place since 2012 and already has an accumulated audience of 2.35 million viewers from 14 regions, which gives Samsung an established customer base instead of building the audience around its own content.

Now, Samsung TV Plus has more than 100 million monthly active users and has almost 5,000 advertisement-supported channels in 30 countries, out of which more than 4,000 hours of content is purely Korean.