Where to Watch Korean Awards Shows Outside Korea

There is no single website, app, or channel where international fans can watch Korean awards shows. Not Baeksang Arts Awards, not the MAMA Awards, not Golden Disc Awards.

Each ceremony is produced and broadcast by a different Korean media company, and each company strikes its own international streaming deal, which can change from one year to the next.

A viewer who finds MAMA on one platform in November should not assume the Baeksang Arts Awards will be on the same platform the following May, or that MAMA itself will still be there the year after.

Where did Baeksang, MAMA, and Golden Disc stream?

This is not tied to one event.

It is a standing problem for anyone outside Korea who wants to watch a Korean awards ceremony live: the streaming location has to be looked up separately, every single time, for every single show. The 62nd Baeksang Arts Awards, held on May 8, 2026, streamed internationally through the app PRIZM and Naver's livestreaming service Chzzk.

The 2025 MAMA Awards, a two-night event on November 28 and 29 in Hong Kong, streamed internationally on HBO Max and on CJ ENM's own Mnet Plus app.

The 40th Golden Disc Awards, held January 10, 2026, at Taipei Dome, streamed internationally on PRIZM again — but that is a coincidence of two shows sharing a corporate parent, not a rule that applies across the industry.

Why each show licenses its own streaming rights

The reason the streaming location keeps changing is structural, and it is something Korean fans absorb without thinking about it, because Korean awards shows are covered constantly by domestic entertainment media that always states which channel is airing which ceremony.

International fans, who mostly encounter these shows through short clips and highlight reels on social media, rarely see that context.

Here is the part that matters: Korean awards shows are not one franchise with one owner. They are produced by competing media companies — mostly broadcasters and entertainment conglomerates — and each company treats its ceremony as its own property to license internationally however it likes.

Baeksang Arts Awards is organized by JoongAng Group, the media conglomerate behind the newspaper JoongAng Ilbo, and broadcast domestically on its cable network JTBC. It is the only major Korean awards ceremony that covers television, film, and theater together in one ceremony, rather than splitting them by medium.

MAMA Awards (formerly "Mnet Asian Music Awards," renamed in 2022) is organized by CJ ENM, the entertainment arm of the CJ conglomerate, and broadcast domestically on its cable music channel Mnet.

It is the most explicitly international of the major shows: it has been held outside Korea for years, in cities including Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Osaka, and its category list includes awards specifically for artists outside the K-pop system.

Golden Disc Awards traces back to Ilgan Sports, a sports newspaper that was itself affiliated with JoongAng Ilbo before being sold to KG Group in the early 2020s; JoongAng Group has organized it since 2022, and it airs domestically on JTBC — the same network as Baeksang, which is why the two shows have occasionally shared an international streaming partner in PRIZM.

Melon Music Awards is run by Kakao Entertainment through its Melon music-streaming service, and its scoring formula gives real weight to streaming and download numbers from that same platform, not just fan voting or judge panels.

Seoul Music Awards, one of the oldest ceremonies in Korean pop music, is organized independently of any single broadcaster, which is part of why its international access has been the least consistent of the group — recent editions have used different combinations of ticketed livestream services rather than a fixed streaming partner.

Then there are the year-end "Gayo" specials — SBS Gayo Daejeon, KBS Gayo Daechukje (also called the KBS Song Festival), and MBC Gayo Daejejeon — which are not competitive awards ceremonies at all but network-specific year-end concert specials, each produced solely by its namesake broadcaster (SBS, KBS, and MBC respectively) with no shared ownership or streaming plan between them.

Because every one of these shows sits inside a different corporate structure, there is no reason to expect them to converge on one international platform, and every reason to expect the opposite.

A deal with a global streamer is negotiated show by show, sometimes year by year, based on that year's budget, sponsorships, and regional priorities.

Understanding this is the single most useful piece of context for an international fan: the question is never "where do I watch Korean awards shows," but "who produced this specific show this year."

How each company built its own streaming path

For most of these ceremonies' histories, international access was not really a design consideration at all. Korean awards shows were built for domestic broadcast television, and viewers outside Korea depended on fan-run streams or delayed uploads.

That began changing as K-pop's overseas audience grew large enough to be worth serving directly, and different companies solved the problem in different ways based on what they already owned.

CJ ENM, which also runs the KCON convention series and a large YouTube network, leaned on its own channels: MAMA has been streamed through Mnet's YouTube properties (Mnet K-Pop, Mnet TV, M2, KCON Official) for years, supplemented more recently by paid partners — Samsung TV Plus carried the 2024 ceremony in the U.S. and other markets, while HBO Max took over for 2025.

JoongAng Group, which does not run an equivalent global YouTube presence, has instead leaned on dedicated apps: PRIZM, a Korean-content streaming service, has become the international home for both Baeksang and Golden Disc Awards in recent years, alongside JTBC's domestic-first streaming service TVING.

Kakao, which owns Melon, routes MMA through its own 1theK YouTube channel and the Wavve streaming service it partly owns.

The public broadcasters KBS and MBC, which are not primarily profit-driven the way cable networks and entertainment conglomerates are, have generally taken the simplest route for their year-end specials: free livestreams on their official YouTube channels, sometimes supplemented by paid options like MBC's Muniverse ticketing platform.

The 59th Baeksang Arts Awards in 2023 is a useful illustration of how unstable these arrangements are even within one show's history: that year's international livestream ran through TikTok, a partner that has not been used for the ceremony since. The following year, Baeksang shifted to PRIZM instead.

Golden Disc Awards has shown similar movement — its 40th ceremony in 2026 was the first ever held entirely outside Korea, at Taipei Dome, changing not just the streaming setup but the physical location fans were watching from Korea to see.

How do I find where a show streams?

None of this is likely to settle into a single standard soon. If anything, the trend points toward more fragmentation before less: CJ ENM's move from Samsung TV Plus to HBO Max for MAMA between 2024 and 2025 shows these deals are renegotiated on a roughly annual basis, not locked in long-term.

Streaming companies are also increasingly willing to pay for exclusive access to a single ceremony rather than a whole slate of Korean content, which raises the odds that different awards shows keep landing on different platforms rather than consolidating.

For a practical approach: check each show separately, close to its air date, using either the ceremony's own official social accounts or up-to-date entertainment coverage — not last year's streaming details, and not another awards show's streaming details, since neither reliably carries over.

Free options (YouTube channels run by the broadcaster, or ad-supported apps like Samsung TV Plus when they are in rotation) tend to exist for most major ceremonies, even in years when a premium platform also picks up the rights, so it is generally worth checking whether a no-cost livestream is available before assuming a paid subscription is required.

Who runs Korea's major awards shows

Frequently asked

Where can I watch the Baeksang Arts Awards outside Korea?

The 62nd Baeksang Arts Awards streamed internationally through the app PRIZM and Naver's Chzzk, but the platform has shifted before — it used TikTok in 2023.

What platform streams the MAMA Awards internationally?

The 2025 MAMA Awards streamed internationally on HBO Max and CJ ENM's own Mnet Plus app, after Samsung TV Plus carried the 2024 ceremony.

Is there one app for all Korean awards shows?

No — each ceremony is produced by a different Korean media company that negotiates its own international streaming deal, so no single platform covers them all.