215
Twitch Will Shut Down Its Streaming Platform in South Korea
(blog.twitch.tv)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
215 points (99.1% liked)
Games
32268 readers
922 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Does anyone know why it's so expensive there?
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.