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A new satellite and an old argument
North Korea’s space agency told the Associated Press last week that it is planning to launch another satellite. The satellite will be the fifth it has attempted to put in orbit. The first three launches were unsuccessful but the fourth, in December 2012, successfully placed a satellite into space, although the satellite appears to have malfunctioned.…
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Hana electronics venture profiled
Hana Electronics, one of North Korea’s best-known and only electronics companies, is profiled in the latest edition of “Foreign Trade” magazine. The company was established in May 2003 as a joint venture between the U.K.’s Phoenix Commercial Ventures and the trading department of North Korea’s Ministry of Culture. It’s been making, or at least assembling, DVD…
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Maritime agency is North Korea’s newest website
North Korea’s Maritime Administration is the latest public institution to put a website on the global Internet. It’s the first new Internet website from North Korea this year and joins a small handful of sites originating from servers in Pyongyang. The site has Korean and English language versions and perhaps most interestingly, a searchable database of…
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Twitter’s Periscope live streaming reaches Pyongyang
It’s probably the first use of Periscope, Twitter’s new video live streaming tool, from Pyongyang. Coleen Baik, a designer who previously worked at Twitter, is in North Korea at the moment as part of the Women Cross DMZ movement. The group are in the headlines for their plan to cross from North Korea to South…
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North Korea’s lights tell story of economic redistribution
NASA’s satellite images of the Korean peninsula at night are a well known and graphic visualization of the huge gap in economic development between North and South Korea. But it turns out, there are other lessons that can be learned from nighttime pictures of North Korea. An economist at Stanford University has studied almost two decades…
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KCTV’s slow move to high-definition, what’s taking so long?
There was a little bit of excitement among North Korea watchers, myself included, earlier this year when the state TV broadcaster, Korean Central Television, took its first step towards high-definition broadcasting. It was signaled by a switch in satellite transmission formats that increased the available screen resolution by more than five times, from just over 414,000 pixels…
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Changes in North Korean TV presentation
North Korean TV news doesn’t change very much. Centrally programmed from Pyongyang, the news can be counted on the provide an update of the work of Kim Jong Un (usually depicted in still photos rather than video), commentary on issues in South Korea and the U.S., reports on innovation in industry, medicine, education and farming, and…
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Reception check: KCTV’s new satellite feed
A couple of weeks ago I reported that satellite monitors had found a new feed of Korean Central Television on Intelsat 21, a satellite above the Atlantic that covers all of the Americas and west Europe. Today I had a chance to check it out. The feed is being broadcast in standard definition PAL. That isn’t…
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More details on Pyongyang’s new satellite center
North Korea’s new satellite control center has been located. Thanks to TV images broadcast on state television, Curtis Melvin was quickly able to match the building with one he’d been observing under construction in central Pyongyang. He reports it’s in the Pothonggang District and estimates the size at about 570 square meters. Satellite images available through Google…
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Jail, probabtion for exports to North Korea
A Taiwanese businessman has been sentenced to 3 years probation and a $250 fine for his part in an attempt to export sanctioned equipment from the U.S. to North Korea. Yueh Hsun “Gary” Tsai was sentenced on Friday at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago after pleading guilty to creating…
