The situation struck him as absurd.

Netflix has a vast presence in South Korea, yet at times it felt to him as though the company – which outsources all of its production to local studios – wielded its influence from behind a curtain.

“One of their first priorities when entering the local market should be to establish some channel of communication with groups like us,” Song says. “But there’s no answer at all.”

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The South Korean actors’ union, echoing concerns from South Korean writers and production workers, says that Netflix profits from a system that underpays supporting actors and that better compensation is long overdue.

A Netflix spokesman declined to say whether the company would meet the union. In a written statement, the company said it follows all local laws and regulations and that as a streaming service – and not a broadcaster – it is not required to pay residuals.

When Netflix arrived in South Korea in 2016, Song and his colleagues at the Korea Broadcasting Performance Rights Association – the union’s partner organisation that collects and distributes residuals – held off on approaching the streaming company.

“A precondition for that conversation about residuals was Netflix’s business successfully taking off here,” says Kim Ju-ho, secretary general of the rights association.

It is clear that this precondition has been met – and more.

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“Netflix has made a lot of money from South Korean content,” Kim says. “It’s now time to meet.”

Union officials in South Korea have been keeping a close eye on the developments in Hollywood.

Though Korean television networks have increasingly outsourced much of their production in the same way, they have continued to engage with the actors’ union – and continue to pay residuals.

Even Korean streaming platforms such as TVing or Wavve, despite being followed by constant bankruptcy rumours, have met the rights association to address the issue.

“Netflix makes use of the country’s broadcasting and content infrastructure just as much as anyone else,” says Yoo Min-suk, policy director at the actors union. “That’s why we’re saying they have an obligation to meet with us.”

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Netflix is far from simply being another player on the field in South Korea – it is the most influential creative force in the business.

“The history of the South Korean industry can be divided into ‘before Netflix’, and ‘after Netflix’,” says an executive at television network MBC, who requested anonymity. “They’ve brought in huge budgets and snapped up all the big-name actors and writers and directors.”

Once a drama powerhouse, his company has recently found itself demoted to the position of outsourced Netflix supplier.

It was an MBC producer, given special permission to take outside work, who created the Netflix hit Physical 100, a reality show that held a top 10 spot in the streamer’s non-English leader board for six weeks earlier this year.

“Compared to how well it did, we sold it for peanuts,” the executive says.

At one internal meeting, opinions had been split about the offer, in which MBC would hand over all the intellectual property to Netflix for a one-time payout of “a few million dollars”.

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But Netflix’s name holds a special cachet – it is a global seal of approval. “Management decided that if it’s distributed through Netflix, we’re not walking away with nothing,” the executive says. “We basically gave up profit for exposure.”

Song acknowledges that plenty of good has come from Netflix. The streamer’s production budgets, low by US standards but large by Korean ones, have opened up a golden age of prestige television in the country, popularising science fiction and other genres that had been deemed too expensive and risky to put on network television.

The company has created jobs and given Korean content an unprecedented global outlet.

For the most part, actors, writers and directors are eager to work with the streamer, given that a Netflix appearance is an opportunity to burnish one’s personal brand.

“The problem is that Netflix’s big production budgets aren’t evenly distributed – most of this money goes to the star actors or big-name screenwriters,” Song says. “For the majority of supporting actors, wages have stagnated or effectively decreased.”

The shift towards streaming has been a gold rush for top talent – even without residuals. A-listers negotiate their own deals and often treat any foregone residuals as baked into their one-time payday, which industry insiders estimate have now broken US$400,000 an episode – about on par with the cast of HBO’s Succession.

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On the opposite end of the spectrum, per-episode rates for supporting actors – who receive neither residuals nor premiums – start at about US$300.

Substituting such “digital twins” for human actors is already happening, though in more limited situations than the actors’ guild’s worst-case scenario, in which twins can be animated with such precision that they can entirely replace humans.

On Black Knight, a South Korean sci-fi series that Netflix released in May, a Korean virtual-reality company called Replica scanned 10 of the main cast members to create digital twins that were used for high-risk action scenes or to retroactively insert a key actor in a scene.

While the technology is still too costly for things like close-ups, the ultimate goal, says Replica chief strategy officer Shane Jeon, is developing it further to replace human actors affordably.

This scenario, he adds, would still depend on a framework of informed consent and fair compensation for the use of actors’ likenesses. “But it will be a very, very long time until that day comes in South Korea,” Jeon says. “The cost of hiring human actors here is much too cheap for that.”

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Meanwhile, Song and Kim have kept themselves busy preparing for the meeting with Netflix that they believe will eventually come.

They have pored over the Screen Actors Guild’s residuals structure, which determines an actor’s residuals payout from several factors, such as the number of subscribers of the streamer airing the show.

The union plans to propose a new wage scale that will impose minimums based on a production’s total budget. “But for now, our only request to Netflix is that South Korean performers be given the same residuals terms that US actors are getting under SAG-AFTRA agreements,” Kim says.

Steeped in the new realities of global streaming, in which foreign content is serving as a buffer for Netflix against the strikes in Hollywood, the union is also contemplating the larger implications of the fight.

“There is undoubtedly common ground that can be found between us and SAG-AFTRA,” Song says. “It would be helpful for similar organisations representing actors around the world to engage with one another, to build up a sense of solidarity. I think that’s important.”

He mulled over whether to write a message of support. Maybe, Kim suggests, they could even fly to Hollywood and deliver the greeting in person – and while they are at it, knock on Netflix’s door.