This morning, I shared with our community in Korea that we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down the Twitch business in Korea on February 27, 2024 KST. We understand that this is extremely disappointing news, and we want to explain why we made this decision and how we are planning to support those impacted.
Ultimately, the cost to operate Twitch in Korea is prohibitively expensive and we have spent significant effort working to reduce these costs so that we could find a way for the Twitch business to remain in Korea.
IIRC, South Korea charges an import tax for foreign media. It’s part of why Korea has become a sort of media powerhouse, with K-pop, K-dramas, K-comics, etc… Those things are much cheaper in SK because they’re all local and aren’t being charged that extra tax. So they’re naturally very popular in SK because they’re much cheaper. Sort of a positive feedback loop where the media is cheaper so people consume more of it, which makes the media popular enough to survive on its own outside of Korea as well.
It’s not about media or taxes, it’s about inflated fees for traffic period. It’s regulatory capture (which Korea has a long history of) and subsequent collusion by Korean ISPs. Prohibitively expensive to run a streaming service like that even if you have local datacenters to reduce international transit fees (because you still have to connect to the local ISPs who will still charge you). https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/08/17/afterword-korea-s-challenge-to-standard-internet-interconnection-model-pub-85166
Edit: To be clear, this sort of situation is about the only one where to effectively have a streaming service, you’d need to use peer to peer and make it “come from inside the house”, so to speak. Even their local streaming services are over the barrel and only the ISPs themselves could actually make an affordable streaming service.
It’s interesting that it’s still classified as foreign media even if the streamers could be local. Wonder if there’ll be a Korean twitch competitor that comes out of this.
There is AfreecaTV. I don’t think Twitch was a big competitor to them locally in the first place. At least from the little I know about it, so take that with an extra train of salt.
I imagine they have CGNAT already. But you can run servers that only assist users to establish a connection handshake from behind CGNAT, then all traffic happens peer to peer.
Now, whether the ISPs can get away with blocking that handshake is another story…
I’m behind cgnat myself and I can download but can’t seed. If everyone is behibd cgnat the swarm would be dead fast. In Korea, there are only 3 ISPs and if they collude to use cgnat with client isolation, they can kill these P2P scheme used by streaming site and boost their profit sharing revenue.
Does anyone know why it’s so expensive there?
Lack of net neutrality is a huge part of it. Korean ISPs bill sites like twitch for the data they use.
This is good ammo for the fight for Net Neutrality, honestly.
IIRC, South Korea charges an import tax for foreign media. It’s part of why Korea has become a sort of media powerhouse, with K-pop, K-dramas, K-comics, etc… Those things are much cheaper in SK because they’re all local and aren’t being charged that extra tax. So they’re naturally very popular in SK because they’re much cheaper. Sort of a positive feedback loop where the media is cheaper so people consume more of it, which makes the media popular enough to survive on its own outside of Korea as well.
It’s not about media or taxes, it’s about inflated fees for traffic period. It’s regulatory capture (which Korea has a long history of) and subsequent collusion by Korean ISPs. Prohibitively expensive to run a streaming service like that even if you have local datacenters to reduce international transit fees (because you still have to connect to the local ISPs who will still charge you). https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/08/17/afterword-korea-s-challenge-to-standard-internet-interconnection-model-pub-85166
Edit: To be clear, this sort of situation is about the only one where to effectively have a streaming service, you’d need to use peer to peer and make it “come from inside the house”, so to speak. Even their local streaming services are over the barrel and only the ISPs themselves could actually make an affordable streaming service.
It’s interesting that it’s still classified as foreign media even if the streamers could be local. Wonder if there’ll be a Korean twitch competitor that comes out of this.
There is AfreecaTV. I don’t think Twitch was a big competitor to them locally in the first place. At least from the little I know about it, so take that with an extra train of salt.
Supposedly that service is P2P, so that’s how they operate without the fees.
That and they are a Korean company as far as I know.
They sponsor a Starcraft 1 League in Korea at least.
Love me some ASL.
I do too. But I always get behind and have to binge it to get back up to date.
Currently binging Season 14. So I’ll hopefully be up to date around christmas again.
So, if the ISP eventually deployed cgnat and broke P2P, they’ll going to be screwed, right?
I imagine they have CGNAT already. But you can run servers that only assist users to establish a connection handshake from behind CGNAT, then all traffic happens peer to peer.
Now, whether the ISPs can get away with blocking that handshake is another story…
you can use p2p services behind cgnat, like how do you think torrent works?
I’m behind cgnat myself and I can download but can’t seed. If everyone is behibd cgnat the swarm would be dead fast. In Korea, there are only 3 ISPs and if they collude to use cgnat with client isolation, they can kill these P2P scheme used by streaming site and boost their profit sharing revenue.
not sure where you’re getting that from, all you need is some server to establish connections via and then it works mostly fine
SPNP - Sending Network Party Pays
The party that creates the traffic pays the operating costs.