Could also have something to do with how corrupt their office is over there. I've heard lots of allegations of female streamers needing to do things such as send nudes or perform sexual acts to stay on the platform. Similar to how the kpop industry is run.
i don't know about any allegations, but i was going to suggest it was probably some scandal brewing.. the reason given is totally bogus.. they are pulling out to avoid pressure from something else entirely..
Shouldn't be that big of a deal. It's not like they are that into video games in checks notes hoo boy!
I don't think Twitch is a major player for streaming in Korea anyway, and Naver just announced they were going into the space, so it's not surprising that Twitch is bowing out.
I'm surprised Naver isn't already the big streaming platform there already, they're involved in pretty much every other tech market as far as I've heard
S. Korea doesn't need more Naver/Kakao crap dominating the market.
Kinda suprised by this. I usually don't use twitch, but last time I was there practically all streams in the largest category were korean. Typically, tech firms don't mind red numbers as long as their user base is enormous.
Typically, tech firms don't mind red numbers as long as their user base is enormous.
They didn't while it was cheap to borrow money. Since interest rates have risen, you can't make these kinds of investments anymore without having some immediate pay off.
It helps that they don't have any serious competitions at the moment but it's very naive to think this won't bolster a competitor enough to make some threat. I guess they feel untouchable with even YouTube struggling
I wonder if the new Twitch competitor that rises in Korea will get the TikTok treatment and our government will just ban it by name?
No, that was step one. Operate at a loss until you suck up all of the users and kill off as much of the competition as you can. Now we're at step two, where the time has come where they desperately need to actually make money, e.g. YouTube. You're going to see more and more "free" sites/apps/services entering step two, if they haven't already.
The importance of net neutrality.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Twitch plans to shut down its business in South Korea on February 27, it said, after finding that operating in one of the world’s largest esports markets is “prohibitively expensive.”
In a blog post, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said the firm undertook a “significant effort” to reduce the network costs to operate in Korea, but ultimately the fees to operate in Korea was still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries.
While we have lowered costs from these efforts, our network fees in Korea are still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries.”
The Amazon-owned streaming service said it has been operating in Korea at a “significant loss,” and there was “no pathway forward” to run the business sustainably in the country.
It’s unclear why network fees is so expensive in South Korea, though Clancy might be alluding to the recent controversial deliberation in the country to require tech companies to pay for network costs.
Korea has always and will continue to play a special role in the international esports community and we are incredibly grateful for the communities they built on Twitch,” wrote Clancy.
The original article contains 242 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 22%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It's a real shame that IPv6 multicast is as IPv4's multicast implementation (global multicast not propagated by ISPs). I feel like live streaming/live TV over the internet could have made really good use of this feature.
It would in theory mean that they wouldn't even need to operate their own servers in other countries/regions. One server could feed everyone.
The problem is a real one, Netflix for example have ISP level caches so that their content isn't streamed across the open internet when it doesn't need to be. But in the rest of the world it's been resolved differently. I'm honestly not sure how ISPs keep up with the backhaul requirements for an ever increasing requirement for speed.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
