BEIJING — China’s obsession with a South Korean television show about a 400-year-old Harvard-educated alien who falls in love with an arrogant actress reached such a frenzy last year that online streaming companies here began racing to snap up licensing rights for other South Korean television programs, inflating their prices almost tenfold.

Then China’s entertainment regulators stepped in, imposing greater limits on foreign television content as part of a broader campaign to rein in China’s fast-growing market for online video, which has become a popular alternative to Chinese broadcast television. (According to official statistics, there were 433 million viewers of online video — TV shows included — in China by the end of 2014, making it the largest streaming market in the world.) Many in the online video industry in China suspect the new guidelines were issued at least partly because of the popularity of “My Love From Another Star.”

Faced with the limits, popular streaming websites like Sohu, iQiyi and Youku want to develop their own Korean-inspired content to sate the country’s appetite for the programming, part of a broader fascination with Korean popular culture. That has meant trying to tap into South Korea’s secret sauce — the magic formula that has turned the country into a pop-culture juggernaut that churns out viral exports like the singer and rapper Psy, the singer Rain and hits like “My Love From Another Star.”

“We share the same culture and cherish similar social values,” said Sophie Yu, director of international communications for iQiyi, the online video streaming website affiliated with the search giant Baidu. “So Korean content naturally is easy to be understood and accepted by the Chinese audience.”