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. First, we experimented with a peer-to-peer model for source quality. Then, we adjusted source quality to a maximum of 720p. While we have lowered costs from these efforts, our network fees in Korea are still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries. Twitch has been operating in Korea at a significant loss, and unfortunately there is no pathway forward for our business to run more sustainably in that country.

SK’s whole economy is weird… it’s dominated by monopolies/oligopolies propped up by its former military dictatorship. While this has been a very successful strategy towards extreme growth on the export market, the chaebols are legally allowed to kinda do whatever they want to crush all local competition.

So, it’s not surprising that Twitch, as an outsider, just got told “fuck you bandwidth is 10x the price for you”. The whole system is specifically setup to allow, say, SK to spin up its own streaming platform which will be vertically integrated with its telco business and given fair/preferential pricing.

Even in the US that’d be an antitrust lawsuit or 10, in South Korea it’s just Wednesday.