Pig & Horse Productions is striking the K-pop iron while it’s hot. The fledgling unscripted prodco, which was set up in Monaco and Finland earlier this summer, has just announced a new project called Europe’s K-Pop Odyssey.

Billed as a digital-first series, it will kick off with an initial scouting process to find passionate young K-pop fans across the continent. A select few will make the cut and be sent to train at a professional K-pop academy in South Korea before finally facing off in a series of live performances.

While the show hasn’t outlined a specific target demo, there’s no doubt it’ll attract the attention of tweens and teens—whether they’ve been following K-pop for years, or whether they’ve only recently entered the world through the gateway of K-Pop Demon Hunters.

Another factor that should give K-Pop Odyssey an edge with youth? The show will incorporate social media and real-time engagement throughout its episodes. Beyond tracking engagement metrics during the scouting process, Pig & Horse plans to leverage user-generated content and real-time feedback. The studio says the series will be a “flexible and scalable production aligning with the audience response.”

London-based media consulting firm Mothership has signed on to develop a global sales strategy for the project, with UpToLevel Media founder Anssi Rimpelä on board as a partner. Rimpelä is well-versed in competition programming, having worked on the Finnish editions of Got Talent and The X Factor.

Competition shows that seek out young music talent and put together the perfect band are nothing new. South Korea’s MNET has already spawned popular audition-based K-pop vehicles like Girls Planet (2021) and Boys Planet (2023). But given the increasingly global appeal of the music genre, this new series could be a sign that the international industry is growing even more eager to spotlight K-pop’s conventions and training practices.

South Korean music giant HYBE has been particularly successful in this area. The company partnered with Geffen Records to create a talent show called Dream Academy that launched on YouTube in 2023 to form “an international group based on K-pop methodology,” according to its chairman Bang Si-hyuk. The series eventually spawned a now-popular girl group known as KATSEYE.

Pictured: Salla Kozma, executive producer and founder of Pig & Horse