Seoul International Drama Awards (SDA), the only global drama festival in Korea, will be held on Sept. 10 without an audience this year to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

The event, which is to take place at the MBC Media Center’s Public Hall in western Seoul, will be live-streamed online and the recorded version will be aired on the MBC broadcast. The online platform which the event is to be live-streamed on and the time schedule for the broadcast are to be announced later.

A total of 212 entries from 41 countries across the continents of Asia, Europe and America will compete in the award categories of International Competition, International Invitation and Outstanding Korean Dramas. Asian drama series took up 108 out of 212 entries.

The awards ceremony this year added a new submission category, called “short-form content,” inviting trending web drama series that last less than 30 minutes per episode. Thirty-seven short-form drama series are to compete for the 2020 awards.

“In this year’s SDA, we put our staff and audiences’ safety first,” an official from the SDA Organizing Committee said through an official statement. “We also hope that SDA could become an outlet for them to communicate with each other in a time when face-to-face interaction is unfeasible.”

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]