Voice of Korea website due Friday
North Korea’s international broadcasting service, The Voice of Korea, will launch a website on Friday, according to a domestic radio report transcribed by BBC Monitoring. (The site has launched a day early. See below for update.)
The site is due to open on Friday, which is Kim Il Sung’s birthday, and will be available at http://www.vok.rep.kp .
The report didn’t detail what the website would carry, but judging from comments and emails I receive concerning the frequency schedule, daily recordings of the station’s programming would be appreciated by its listeners. The shortwave signal is sometimes difficult to hear.
Voice of Korea broadcasts in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. It also relays programs from the Pyongyang Broadcasting Station, which is aimed at Koreans in nearby countries, and the domestic Korea Central Broadcasting Station.
The upcoming launch of the site could explain the current absence of many North Korean websites. They’ve been dropping off the Internet this week, and that could mean engineers are reorganizing servers in preparation for the launch.
North Korea often uses national holidays to launch websites.
(Thanks to reader Tobias Dondelinger for pointing me to the report on Radio Netherlands’ Media Network.)
Update 1: The site appeared on Thursday afternoon, although doesn’t appear to be quite ready yet. It has audio news files posted as AAC audio clips, but I had trouble getting any to play. I suspect they are still uploading content to the server.
Users can download the same HMS Player that is in use on the KCNA site. If you’d rather not do that, I’ll post a work-around as soon as I confirm it.
All nine language services have a page. The English service page includes news, songs, and programs.
I’ll post a fuller report later tonight or tomorrow, but here’s what it looks like:
| Print article | This entry was posted by Martyn Williams on April 14, 2011 at 06:48, and is filed under Internet, Media, Radio, Websites. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
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about 3 years ago
many thanks! the sites are back up now.
about 3 years ago
KCNA have a new website:
http://www.kcna.kp/goHome.do?lang=eng
about 3 years ago
When I go to the site I see the Naenara page?
about 3 years ago
@ gerben: same here. I hope the VOK website will be up again soon! I want to hear more DPRK music
about 3 years ago
I caught the Naenara page this morning, but I got the Voice of Korea page later, as you can see. I guess I was lucky.
It should be online tomorrow, if all goes according to plant.
about 3 years ago
Ok that’s good.
about 3 years ago
I can’t seem to open the audio files.. I get a window saying that Firefox can’t open kms:// thingies. And Internet Explorer just says “the page cannot be found”.
Anyone else got this problem?
about 3 years ago
@Danny
You have to download HMSPlayer:
http://www.vok.rep.kp/CBC/CBC_download/HMSPlayer.exe
about 3 years ago
Never mind, I hadn’t installed that media player
Nice music, hopefully they’ll upload more soon.
about 2 years ago
I have downloaded the HMS Player, now it does not work and I cannot hear anything from Voice of Korea from the website. Is anyone having any similar problem? Is there any other player that can be used to play this content. Hope someone can help.
about 1 year ago
I’m using Ubuntu GNU/Linux, any ideas on how I can get it to play?
about 1 year ago
This is reporting VOK broadcast as follows:
Date: 2 May 2013
Time: 1505-1550 UTC
Frequency: 11680 kHz
QTH: Urban (106:46E 06:23S), about 30 km south of Jakarta, Indonesia
Receiver: SONY ICF-SW7600GR
Antenna: 20 m long wire antenna
SINPO: 54433
Program heard: non stop music, song, and chorus. I have a 5 minutes recording of this broadcast, made starting from 1545 UTC as .mp4 sound file which I would like to send to your email address. Please inform me to which address I should have to send that file.
Kindly also let me have your highly appreciated verification on this report, either by return email or by regular mail sent to –
Tony Ashar
Perumahan BDN C3/3
Depok 16434
Indonesia.
Thank you very much for your kind attention.
about 1 month ago
Hello
can you send me e-mail adress internet to write you
J listen your program in french
best regards
Mr Monplot
7 rue de siam
56100 Lorient
France
jm.monplot@yahoo.fr