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.

[–] roguetrick@kbin.social 63 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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.

[–] JohnWorks@sh.itjust.works 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] pleb_maximus@feddit.de 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] roguetrick@kbin.social 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Supposedly that service is P2P, so that's how they operate without the fees.

[–] pleb_maximus@feddit.de 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That and they are a Korean company as far as I know.
They sponsor a Starcraft 1 League in Korea at least.

[–] rigatti@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Love me some ASL.

[–] pleb_maximus@feddit.de 2 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

So, if the ISP eventually deployed cgnat and broke P2P, they'll going to be screwed, right?

[–] lemmyvore@feddit.nl 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

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...

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

you can use p2p services behind cgnat, like how do you think torrent works?

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

not sure where you're getting that from, all you need is some server to establish connections via and then it works mostly fine

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 1 points 7 months ago

We're still taking about Korean ISP charging streaming company for bandwidth, right? If the streaming service setup some TURN servers to help people behind cgnat, then they'll going to get charged by the ISP because the traffic originate from TURN servers operated by the streaming service instead of peer-to-peer traffics among users. These ISPs rejected Netflix offers to put their caching servers inside their network afterall, so the TURN servers will have to be located outside their network and thus subject to the bandwidth charge.

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 23 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

SPNP - Sending Network Party Pays
The party that creates the traffic pays the operating costs.