News An Update on Twitch in South Korea: Discontinuation of Twitch.tv Streaming Service

[tom_mai78101]

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. 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.

To all of our global communities, we want to make it clear that this is a unique situation. Operating costs in Korea are significantly higher than they are in other countries and we have been open about this challenge for some time.

Twitch streamers in Korea have devoted significant time and effort into building their communities, and we plan to help these communities find new homes — even if it’s regrettably not on Twitch. We will work to help Twitch streamers in Korea move their communities to alternative livestreaming services in Korea. We are also reaching out to several of these services to help with the transition and will communicate with impacted streamers as those discussions progress.

An Update on Twitch in Korea

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...

blog.twitch.tv

For context on why this is happening, this is a unique situation only in South Korea. The article below explains why.

Starting with a 2016 amendment to Korea's Telecommunications Business Act (TBA), same-tier ISPs (of comparable size) have had to compensate each other based on the volume of traffic they exchange under a sending-party-network-pays policy (SPNP). In turn, consumers' ISPs regularly pass these costs on to providers of online content like Netflix, and thus their customers through higher prices.

This payment scheme effectively penalizes high traffic volume, since it assesses fees based on the volume of data being transmitted, so it disincentivizes large content providers from positioning themselves in a content chain that ends in South Korea. This process creates inefficient traffic flows that the government has tried to ameliorate by mandating large content providers to ensure stable services. It has also increased the costs of doing business: 2021 internet transit prices in Seoul far exceeded those in Paris and New York.

Korea should not require companies to pay to deliver digital content

Since the emergence of the broadband internet, there have been disagreements about who should pay to transmit data. When a Korean user downloads an episode of “Squid Game,” who should pay for transmission of that data from the server hosting the episode to the user's computer: the company...

www.koreatimes.co.kr