Twitch to end business & operations in Korea
The Twitch company claims that operating costs in Korea are tremendously higher than in any other nation.
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy has announced that the company is shutting down business and operations in Korea in late February. This will result in Twitch services becoming unavailable in the country, and partnered Twitch streamers being dropped. Clancy has said that the main reasoning behind the shutdown is prohibitive costs of running Twitch in Korea, which he also claims are substantially higher than in most other regions.
Clancy shared the full statement on Twitch’s shutdown in Korea in a press release posted on the Twitch website on December 5, 2023. According to Clancy, the company tried to hold out and find solutions to sustain the company’s presence in Korea, but to little success:
Source: Twitch
Ultimately, this also means that Twitch streamers in Korea will have to find a new home. For partnered Twitch streamers, the company claims it will work to help them transition to new platforms if it can:
It's a rough situation to be sure, but one Twitch claims is unique to Korea. Having pulled support for Twitch on Nintendo Switch recently, it seems Twitch is looking to cut some costs and Korea was unfortunately next on the slate. Stay tuned as we follow for further updates on this story.
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replyTJ Denzer posted a new article, Twitch to end business & operations in Korea
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Twitch is shutting down operations in Korea - Completely.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/18brihm/twitch_shutting_down_business_in_korea_on/-
guess most of them will either go to YT or afreeca.
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or kick
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I grew up hearing South Korea had the best and cheapest internet on the planet.
Was I lied to?-
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South Korean ISPs will happily connect you to a link running at 1 Gbps, the problem is their backhaul network has never had the capacity to support actually utilizing that bandwidth.
What really hurts Twitch and other data heavy services is that peering costs in SK are insanely high due to regulations that allow telecoms to demand high fees for incoming traffic. -
Few factors, it helps if a large part of the population live in the same vicinity, also when did you hear that, at some point Sweden was on t1 lines when we were using Dialup to play quake. Germany had at some point good internet, copper lines in every home allowed for DSL of some fashion but that lead to zero investment in fiber which was the reason it fell behind for a decade. Now they are massively investing in fiber and mobile again because they have to (were forced by the government/are subsidized by it as well).
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This would have been the early 2000s.
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There you go. Basically every new tech investment is gonna be milked into the ground before someone disrupts the market or government forces the big isp providers to do something. If you look at the US you will see how there are some areas where there is only one viable provider. Korea is also notorious for its dubious conglomerates, and political corruption so I wouldn't expect the push to come from the government side.
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According to TeleGeography, the cost of transit in Seoul is typically eight to ten times that of major European network hubs like London and Frankfurt.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/08/17/afterword-korea-s-challenge-to-standard-internet-interconnection-model-pub-85166 -
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