ImaginAsian
American media company
ImaginAsian Entertainment, Inc was an American multimedia company founded by Michael Hong and Augustine Hong and a group of investors that recognized the emerging importance of "all-things Asian." Based in New York City, its main attraction was a television network, iaTV, which premiered in 2004 and which focused on entertainment featuring Korean, Japanese, and South-East Asian content. The channel competed in certain markets with AZN Television until April 2008, when the competing network ceased broadcasting. ImaginAsian itself ceased operations in 2011, selling its channel slot to CJ E&M for broadcast of the world feed of Mnet.
They also operated The ImaginAsian, a renovated movie theater located in Midtown Manhattan that shows only first-run and classic East Asian films, as well as several film festivals per year. The company renovated a second former movie theater in Los Angeles that opened in December 2007, the former Linda Lea Theater, which originally showed Japanese films and served the Little Tokyo area before shuttering in the 1980s.
In addition, past divisions of the company consisted of iaLink, ImaginAsian Entertainment's monthly on-line magazine, which at one point had over ten million subscribers, ImaginAsian Pictures and Home Entertainment, a film and DVD distribution division that released several DVDs of East Asian films and iaTV original shows, and the successful theatrical and DVD release of the Vietnamese American film Journey from the Fall, and iaRadio, a block of radio programming both streamed on-line as well as made available on certain terrestrial stations.
History
In early January 2005, its carriage was extended to Comcast's head-end for Southern California. If viewer demand was high, Comcast would launch the 24-hour feed locally. The channel's first original show was Uncle Morty's Dub Shack.
At the end of 2005, iaTV bought the rights to two KBS dramas, Winter Sonata and Full House.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “ImaginAsian” is american media company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through ImaginAsian, American and media, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6002408. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2008, 2011 and 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “ImaginAsian” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.