Yeah, and it all started from a lawsuit between SK Telecom and Netflix because in 2020 people watching Squid Games in Korea used an unprecedented amount of bandwidth. Reuters article
Most telecom providers make deals with the big platforms regarding payment, but I guess S. Korea really wants Afreeca to be the only player in the streaming space. It could also be chaebol shenanigans.
How is remaining in an unprofitable market a “loss leader”?
Sometimes you gotta take a small loss for the overall benefit of the company/system.
You really don’t think Twitch did some analysis on this matter before making a decision? Or do you just figure that your uninformed assumptions about their financials are more accurate than their internal analysis? Clearly whatever benefit they were or were not getting from their SK business was not enough to justify the operating costs.
They're leaving the market. If anything Amazon is putting a shot across the bow of the ISPs who are charging these interconnect fees to get THEM negative press and make the Korean public demand a change in the laws so they can get the Internet they pay for.
Amazon may be quitting twitch in Korea, but their cloud services are still paying for the dumb fees.
What negative press? They’re no longer going to do business in a particular market for completely normal reasons. This isn’t some kind of scandal, it’s a standard decision for a company to make regarding unprofitable operations. Everyone besides you seems to understand this.
You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
Neither does the person you’re replying to. They probably just learned the term “loss leader” and thought they’d sound smart bringing it up but have no idea how the concept actually works in practice.
What the actual fuck are you talking about? A simple google search shows that Amazon very much makes a profit. Do some basic research first before posting bullshit please.
Companies don’t just want to make a profit, they want to make the largest profit. Plenty of businesses turn down profitable ventures in pursuit of more lucrative returns.
Why would they do that if they aren't mutually exclusive to one another? I'd get this notion if they'd started to do some sort of alternate way of providing for the SK market where their original platform would have been in the way but why close off profitable branches for no reason at all?
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 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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Which would be passed to their customers in the form of more expensive VPN price. Either way, the ISPs are the winner here, and I think someone mentioned that it’s practically impossible to create a new ISP due to regulatory capture so there will be no competition to challenge the oligopoly.
This’ll probably happen, anyone wanting to watch or stream on Twitch will probably just go through the Japanese servers. But Twitch isn’t that popular in Korea anyways, most of the Korea-based streamers on the platform have large foreign audiences.
blog.twitch.tv
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