This is probably the first service ever to be effectively shut down in a country by anti-net neutrality policies. This is the model know as sending party network pays (the same model that led to international telephone calls costing $5 a minute), and it has terrible incentives.
Unfortunately, Europe, Brazil and India are all looking to emulate Korea's requirement that online services pay ISPs.
It's particularly bad in the E.U. where Commissioner Thierry Breton, a former telecom CEO, wants to shove it through despite overwhelming opposition, including from the EU's top telecom regulators (BEREC).
Native Korean here, It's way worse here. It has been a decade since former telecom board members in the chief of Korea Communications Commission, which should prevent this in the first place.
The Netflix trial back in 2021 beforehand was due to SK Broadband (South Korean ISP) having lots of NTT bound traffic since they didn't join the Netflix's OpenConnect Program while requesting Netflix to co-locate in their server main content servers in (the SK Broadband). The results? Netflix found guilty for causing those traffics.
For your information, You can't establish an ISP in South Korea since the law forbids anyone other than "3 major telecom"s (SK Broadband, KT, LG U+). Regulations protecting telecoms and making sure CPs getting properly ripped off (Bonus point if you are not domestic business).
> It's particularly bad in the E.U. where Commissioner Thierry Breton, a former telecom CEO, wants to shove it through despite overwhelming opposition, including from the EU's top telecom regulators (BEREC).
Pure speculation, but I wonder how much of this is done in an attempt to push out Western companies in favor of Korean companies. All of the large telecoms in Korea sponsor eSports teams, they probably want to develop local services and stimulate their own economy. Beyond that, it's much easier to control or assert political pressure on a local company, while Twitch is known for being notoriously unreceptive.
I watch competitive StarCraft 2 and Brood War, both of which only provide the highest quality stream through AfreecaTV. This isn't something I've looked much into, but I swear that AfreecaTV also has a way better bitrate and encoding than what you get with unpaid YouTube.
This post leaves me wondering about YouTube's relationship with Korea. Someone mentioned Worlds 2023, which was dual streamed on Twitch and YouTube Live.
This has long been portrayed as the battle between "poor local internet services who pay huge sum to telcos" and "evil international internet services who bombard our poor telcos and pay nothing for it". The main target was video streaming, who makes the most traffic; I believe game streaming simply got caught up by the wide net. In fact the law that mandated the "sender pays" principle was dubbed "anti-Netflix law".
Sidenote: The local telcos have long tried to make their VOD service "Wavve" work. The service is part of SK Telecom, who sued Netflix for traffic payment as they didn't have cache server unlike the other 2 telcos.
Why are Korean network costs so much higher? In the aughts Korea was famous for its internet infrastructure. How do other streaming services survive there?
Korea, pound for pound, has to be one of the most poorly legislated technology states in the world.
Everything is in absolute bizarro land in Korea when it comes to technology. Here are just a few of things I’ve encountered in Korea:
- You have to have a phone number to sign up for any type of account. (Hasn’t discouraged any toxicity either.)
- Foreigners can’t use things like delivery apps because they can’t make accounts due to the phone number thing or they can’t use their international credit cards.
- Most people own windows PCs because in order to do any banking in Korea you have to install software that is tantamount to the bank’s spyware on your computer.
- All mobile phones have non-mutable shutter sounds.
- Location services like find my iPhone are banned.
- cellular data usage costs an arm and a leg, making free WiFi a necessity at any business
- The quality of FaceTime calls is extremely throttled. For the longest time FaceTime just didn’t even work. KakaoTalk video calls never had that problem.
- contactless pay via Apple Pay was only introduced this past year
You’d think Korea would be bleeding edge when it comes to technology it’s far from a technocracy, It’s just a stumbling, bumbling, corrupt state that can only get out of its own way to clear space for the large conglomerates.
I feel so sad for the Korean people. What should be a thriving, entrepreneurship-driven economy is the exact opposite - an oppressive, corporatist hole that sucks up peoples economic dreams and emits zero-sum, despair-driven ambition.
1. "Cross-Connect" fees when you connect 2 or more networks into any of your device (paid separately of ISP subscription)
2. Monopoly of "3 ISPs" that protected by law (No newcomers can join)
This all brings up to up-to 100 times expensive internet than Europe in Korea.
(not Residential, but for CPs. Residential internet services are cheaper, but if you operate any servers your service will be terminated.) fyi, I kinda estimate the twitch should pay upto 300K USD/mo. (if they got lucky and got "domestic business deal") to just make sure their service up and running
> YouTube threatens to cut down investments in Korea over ‘network usage fee’ bill
>Proposed revisions will require global content providers to pay network fees to local Internet service providers
> The planned revision to the Telecommunications Business Act -- also known as the ‘network usage fee’ bills -- would require global content providers to sign mandatory contracts with local Internet service providers such as KT and SK Broadband to standardize obligations to pay fees for using their networks
> South Korean Internet service provider SK Broadband has sued Netflix (NFLX.O) to pay for costs from increased network traffic and maintenance work because of a surge of viewers to the U.S. firm's content, an SK spokesperson said on Friday.
> The move comes after a Seoul court said Netflix should "reasonably" give something in return to the internet service provider for network usage, and multiple South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic.
Twitch also deleted recorded VOD content of Twitch Korean streamers last year for what they said was a different regulation:
> The move comes after a Seoul court said Netflix should "reasonably" give something in return to the internet service provider for network usage, and multiple South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic.
Why not charge the end user? That seems like it would be more fair, easier to implement, and require no regulation. Makes it seem like they have other motives.
Actually found a pretty good source on what the Korean rules are (hint - it is about paid peering).
This is somewhat biased (it's from a Spanish telecom - actually editing this again, the style choice + date formatting makes me think it is from a Korean trade group/telecom but the only source I can find for this is Telefonica. Likely from the Korean telecom industry itself...).
Just haven't really seen a comment linking to anything substantial about the actual plans/rules/etc in Korea.
The accompanying blog post makes it clear that this is from the Korean Telecommunications Operators Association, and has the explicit goal of "debunking" "myths" (read: inconvenient truths) about Korean telcos.
Telefonica's blog is amazing. They come out and say the outrageous things giant telecoms believe: that internet service should be 1) people pay them and then they get to connect to 2) the select group of websites and services that also pay telefonica.
There's a very good reason that the U.S. net neutrality orders banned these kinds of fees starting in 2010, and again in 2015. California's net neutrality law also bans access fees
Every time the topic of net neutrality comes up here, the anti-NN crowd says “all the pro-NN points are just scaremongering, there’s no evidence that any of that bad stuff about ISP favoritism would actually happen”. Well, here’s the evidence. Korea doesn’t have NN, and now Twitch is pulling out (and YouTube is halting investment, according to one sibling comment) because the ISPs gouged it to death.
Net neutrality should be mandatory and non-negotiable.
How does this have anything to do with net neutrality?
From what I can see, twitch is a business that benefits from the fact that most internet companies don't actually have to pay for internet connection services relative to their usage.
They're mad that forcing them to pay relative to their usage breaks their business model that relies on being subsidised by other internet usage and users, how does that have anything to do with net neutrality?
If anything wouldn't it be more in line with net neutrality to require that servicss that use more of the internet infrastructure pay for it instead of being subsidised by users of other services/sites?
Here's some context: when Amazon bought Twitch, it basically took that IP and created Amzon Interaction Video Services ("IVS") [1] as a live streaming solution within AWS. IVS is also the basis for Kick.
Amazon and Twitch frequently talk about how Twitch is unprofitable and use it as an excuse to increase ad density. lower creator rev share, etc. Thing is, their unfprfitability is largely an accounting trick. Let's asy the compute cost for a stream is $50 and the ad revenue is $80 but there are two points in between: IVS and Twitch. Amazon could charge $50 for IVS and Twitch is super-profitable. Amazon could charge $90 for IVS and Twitch is losing money even though IVS is hugely profitable.
The reason I bring this up is that I'm skeptical about Amazon's claims of Twitch in Korea being unprofitable just like I'm skeptical of all of Amazon's statements regarding Twtich profitability. South Korea is a developed nation with robust netowrk infrastructure. I doubt egress bandwidth from South Korea is particularly expensive. If it is, Amazon is a large enough company to solve that with their own backhaul. AWS has a region in South Korea so encoding shouldn't be an issue.
In the last 2-3 years we've had a slew of reports from the likes of CVS and Walmart blaming theft on unprofitability in closing stores. This was and is a lie. It's used to mask rising costs, poor inventory management and bad execution.
So when I see an announcement like this I really have to ask "what failure is Amazon/Twitch really hiding?" because I'm convinced there is one.
It's not the actual cost. It's the Korean regulatory requirement that sending networks pay. That's why Cloudflare moved most CDN content out of S. Korea to Japan, and why Facebook did the same, and why Netflix sued SK Broadband.
ISPs have termination monopolies. They can charge what they like to reach their because there is literally no other path to them.
Termination fees lead to high prices and weird arbitrage games. The long distance phone system works this way, which is why it's still like $5 a minute to call India from the US, and "free conference call" systems set up in rural areas to juice incoming call revenue.
I wonder why Korea costs so much more for Twitch to run their service. Really interesting that they even experimented with peer-to-peer to solve it. Would like to see a write-up of why that didn't work. Honestly not even sure how that would have worked in the first place with live streaming. I guess you just inherently accept a lot more latency in trying to save money?
Basically, ISPs in Korea charge services extra fees based on the amount of traffic they generate.
The Korean government / ISPs justification for (effectively) removing net neutrality is that services such as Netflix/Twitch put an undue strain on the internet infrastructure that shouldn’t be borne by every user.
Of course while Netflix can raise prices to cover those fees, Twitch is free, so it can’t do the same.
I can see both sides of the argument here, but it is strange to me that the cost does not fall on consumers instead of the producers—the U.S. has had bandwidth caps for users for a several years.
I'm going purely off memory, but I recall vaguely that in Korea there are charges for the "push" side of network use, as well as the "pull" side. I can't recall if this is a government thing, or an ISP thing, or a confluence of both working together. I seem to recall Netflix becoming frustrated about this at some point.
Maybe someone can find more info, since I'm replying on a device that makes actually looking this up a little tricky.
It's interesting that they're using the Twitch name rather than Amazon to announce this. The Twitch ASN (which, incidentally, is present at 3 Seoul IXPs) was renamed to "Amazon IVS" post-acquisition. https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/46489
The streamers and viewers that will be affected by this are Twitch users, not Amazon users, so of course it makes sense that this is Twitch announcing it to their userbase and not Amazon.
I'm curious about the operating costs. It seems like Twitch should be losing money, as YouTube does, but because Google/Amazon are gaining other non-monetary benefits that eventually become profits in other services, they keep them alive.
In order to help this they make all kinds of deals with governments. What I am getting at is without more information, I can't really tell if this is a good or bad thing. Companies that aren't profitable and use government to stay afloat should go out of business.
i'm going to guess that this is korean protectionism at work under the guise of valid regulation. look at the Apple location services, google maps, uber/lyft, etc. basically any industry that could have a "home grown" version gets some preferential treatment through some bs law or national security. for better or worse, chaebols own korea.
I blame Twitch's laziness. There is a competitor of Twitch in South Korea, namely AfreecaTV, and it is highly profitable. Why is AfreecaTV sustainable whereas Twitch is not? Because Twitch hasn't altered its business model while operating in the Korean market. The same network cost applies to both AfreecaTV and Twitch, so there can't be a fundamental restriction keeping Twitch from being profitable in South Korea.
One thing that makes AfreecaTV profitable is that it charges a fee for every donation happening in the platform. Twitch does not. AfreecaTV also uses a P2P network to reduce network cost. These policies may make the users and the streamers a bit annoyed, but it is still infinitely better than abandoning the service.
Twitch being unprofitable is a smokescreen. After acquiring Twitch, Amazon gutted it of its infrastructure IP and transferred it to a subsidiary of AWS. Amazon can now decide how much they want to charge Twitch as an entity for the AWS services they now need, that’s where the unprofitability comes from.
Interestingly enough, they still run in Russia, where the market was probably the fraction of that of Korea, and now they neither run any ads nor have a painless paid subscription process.
The timeline is a bit confusing to me, since it only talks about disabling monetization for Korean users. Will they eventually be blocked from the service entirely?
I imagine Twitch will stop operating Korean CDNs. It wouldn't make much sense to geo-block all Korean IP addresses, but with minimum service I expect Korean viewers to drop off pretty quickly. If the networks are as badly configured as the internet articles claim they are, foreign internet uplinks wouldn't be able to sustain decent quality video streams for very long.
VPNs and such will always allow Koreans to watch Twitch content, but by taking money or paying out revenue, Twitch as a company would create certain expectations of service. Now, with no special effort put into Korean service, I expect Twitch to become essentially useless. Perhaps the Korean localisation team will slowly let more and more untranslated English strings slip into the UI, though they may decide to keep the Korean translations for the benefit Korean minorities outside of Korea.
Service providers like anywhere, net neutrality be damned, run Deep Packet Inspection boxes that have no other purpose in life but to negotiate down your connections for whatever you do the ISP finds egregious.
For video, they generally reduce the video quality throughput, eventually reducing bitrate, causing buffering, and generally making your experience miserable unless Twitch, Youtube, etc pay the providers NOT to on behalf of their users. Cellcos particularly do this a lot to reduce quality so people aren't trying to watch 4k streams on a phone just because they can, it'll negotiate them down to what they feel is an acceptable like 480p, usually with some clause hidden in the fine print of your contract about acceptable use.
South Korea simply legitimized all their ISP's doing so, as much as Ajit Pai did repealing net neutrality for American ISP's as their puppet under Trump.
The big Internet companies should probably all pull out of South Korea to send a message to the rest of the world about the outcomes of net neutrality.
Basically, if a Korean subscriber to a broadband network requests data from your app and you send it, you have to pay that person's ISP.
It's a terrible economic model that punishes peering. Cloudflare and Facebook moved most of their servers overseas to Japan. It's been a long running sh*t show, with lots of lawsuits between Netflix and S. Korea's biggest telecom.
And unfortunately EU Commissioner Thierry Breton wants to bring this model to the EU.
[+] [-] rsingel|2 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, Europe, Brazil and India are all looking to emulate Korea's requirement that online services pay ISPs.
It's particularly bad in the E.U. where Commissioner Thierry Breton, a former telecom CEO, wants to shove it through despite overwhelming opposition, including from the EU's top telecom regulators (BEREC).
[+] [-] Alex4386|2 years ago|reply
The Netflix trial back in 2021 beforehand was due to SK Broadband (South Korean ISP) having lots of NTT bound traffic since they didn't join the Netflix's OpenConnect Program while requesting Netflix to co-locate in their server main content servers in (the SK Broadband). The results? Netflix found guilty for causing those traffics.
For your information, You can't establish an ISP in South Korea since the law forbids anyone other than "3 major telecom"s (SK Broadband, KT, LG U+). Regulations protecting telecoms and making sure CPs getting properly ripped off (Bonus point if you are not domestic business).
[+] [-] Semaphor|2 years ago|reply
How would it then get through parliament?
[+] [-] prakhar897|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|2 years ago|reply
I watch competitive StarCraft 2 and Brood War, both of which only provide the highest quality stream through AfreecaTV. This isn't something I've looked much into, but I swear that AfreecaTV also has a way better bitrate and encoding than what you get with unpaid YouTube.
This post leaves me wondering about YouTube's relationship with Korea. Someone mentioned Worlds 2023, which was dual streamed on Twitch and YouTube Live.
[+] [-] dj_gitmo|2 years ago|reply
According to this article, on of the proponents is SK Telecom, of “SK Terran” fame. https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-netflix-under-scru...
[+] [-] ponorin|2 years ago|reply
Sidenote: The local telcos have long tried to make their VOD service "Wavve" work. The service is part of SK Telecom, who sued Netflix for traffic payment as they didn't have cache server unlike the other 2 telcos.
[+] [-] next_xibalba|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/project...
[+] [-] kbumsik|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dj_gitmo|2 years ago|reply
EDIT: I’m guessing this is related https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-netflix-under-scru...
[+] [-] laborcontract|2 years ago|reply
Everything is in absolute bizarro land in Korea when it comes to technology. Here are just a few of things I’ve encountered in Korea:
- You have to have a phone number to sign up for any type of account. (Hasn’t discouraged any toxicity either.)
- Foreigners can’t use things like delivery apps because they can’t make accounts due to the phone number thing or they can’t use their international credit cards.
- Most people own windows PCs because in order to do any banking in Korea you have to install software that is tantamount to the bank’s spyware on your computer.
- All mobile phones have non-mutable shutter sounds.
- Location services like find my iPhone are banned.
- cellular data usage costs an arm and a leg, making free WiFi a necessity at any business
- The quality of FaceTime calls is extremely throttled. For the longest time FaceTime just didn’t even work. KakaoTalk video calls never had that problem.
- contactless pay via Apple Pay was only introduced this past year
You’d think Korea would be bleeding edge when it comes to technology it’s far from a technocracy, It’s just a stumbling, bumbling, corrupt state that can only get out of its own way to clear space for the large conglomerates.
I feel so sad for the Korean people. What should be a thriving, entrepreneurship-driven economy is the exact opposite - an oppressive, corporatist hole that sucks up peoples economic dreams and emits zero-sum, despair-driven ambition.
[+] [-] guu|2 years ago|reply
[0]: https://about.netflix.com/en/news/sk-telecom-sk-broadband-an...
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/skorea-broadb...
[+] [-] Alex4386|2 years ago|reply
This all brings up to up-to 100 times expensive internet than Europe in Korea. (not Residential, but for CPs. Residential internet services are cheaper, but if you operate any servers your service will be terminated.) fyi, I kinda estimate the twitch should pay upto 300K USD/mo. (if they got lucky and got "domestic business deal") to just make sure their service up and running
[+] [-] catlover76|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belltaco|2 years ago|reply
From https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220421000740
> YouTube threatens to cut down investments in Korea over ‘network usage fee’ bill
>Proposed revisions will require global content providers to pay network fees to local Internet service providers
> The planned revision to the Telecommunications Business Act -- also known as the ‘network usage fee’ bills -- would require global content providers to sign mandatory contracts with local Internet service providers such as KT and SK Broadband to standardize obligations to pay fees for using their networks
And from: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/skorea-broadb...
> South Korean Internet service provider SK Broadband has sued Netflix (NFLX.O) to pay for costs from increased network traffic and maintenance work because of a surge of viewers to the U.S. firm's content, an SK spokesperson said on Friday.
> The move comes after a Seoul court said Netflix should "reasonably" give something in return to the internet service provider for network usage, and multiple South Korean lawmakers have spoken out against content providers who do not pay for network usage despite generating explosive traffic.
Twitch also deleted recorded VOD content of Twitch Korean streamers last year for what they said was a different regulation:
https://twitter.com/zachbussey/status/1590532134011564032
[+] [-] zeroCalories|2 years ago|reply
Why not charge the end user? That seems like it would be more fair, easier to implement, and require no regulation. Makes it seem like they have other motives.
[+] [-] stephenitis|2 years ago|reply
I recently watched the opening ceremony for the finals and it blew me away how much effort went into the production for this event.
Worlds 2023 Finals Opening Ceremony https://youtu.be/AH8A79BrTEY?si=x5K0GcO-lrS89XEl
[+] [-] jinxedpenguin|2 years ago|reply
This is somewhat biased (it's from a Spanish telecom - actually editing this again, the style choice + date formatting makes me think it is from a Korean trade group/telecom but the only source I can find for this is Telefonica. Likely from the Korean telecom industry itself...).
Just haven't really seen a comment linking to anything substantial about the actual plans/rules/etc in Korea.
https://www.telefonica.com/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/202...
[+] [-] resolutebat|2 years ago|reply
https://www.telefonica.com/en/communication-room/blog/myths-...
Here's the Internet Society brief they appear to be responding to:
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/05/old-rules-in-ne... (summary)
https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2022/internet-... (full doc)
[+] [-] Joking_Phantom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsingel|2 years ago|reply
There's a very good reason that the U.S. net neutrality orders banned these kinds of fees starting in 2010, and again in 2015. California's net neutrality law also bans access fees
[+] [-] Analemma_|2 years ago|reply
Net neutrality should be mandatory and non-negotiable.
[+] [-] charcircuit|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xelynega|2 years ago|reply
From what I can see, twitch is a business that benefits from the fact that most internet companies don't actually have to pay for internet connection services relative to their usage.
They're mad that forcing them to pay relative to their usage breaks their business model that relies on being subsidised by other internet usage and users, how does that have anything to do with net neutrality?
If anything wouldn't it be more in line with net neutrality to require that servicss that use more of the internet infrastructure pay for it instead of being subsidised by users of other services/sites?
[+] [-] jmyeet|2 years ago|reply
Amazon and Twitch frequently talk about how Twitch is unprofitable and use it as an excuse to increase ad density. lower creator rev share, etc. Thing is, their unfprfitability is largely an accounting trick. Let's asy the compute cost for a stream is $50 and the ad revenue is $80 but there are two points in between: IVS and Twitch. Amazon could charge $50 for IVS and Twitch is super-profitable. Amazon could charge $90 for IVS and Twitch is losing money even though IVS is hugely profitable.
The reason I bring this up is that I'm skeptical about Amazon's claims of Twitch in Korea being unprofitable just like I'm skeptical of all of Amazon's statements regarding Twtich profitability. South Korea is a developed nation with robust netowrk infrastructure. I doubt egress bandwidth from South Korea is particularly expensive. If it is, Amazon is a large enough company to solve that with their own backhaul. AWS has a region in South Korea so encoding shouldn't be an issue.
In the last 2-3 years we've had a slew of reports from the likes of CVS and Walmart blaming theft on unprofitability in closing stores. This was and is a lie. It's used to mask rising costs, poor inventory management and bad execution.
So when I see an announcement like this I really have to ask "what failure is Amazon/Twitch really hiding?" because I'm convinced there is one.
[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/ivs/
[+] [-] rsingel|2 years ago|reply
The demanded fees are outrageous.
[+] [-] zeroCalories|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsingel|2 years ago|reply
Termination fees lead to high prices and weird arbitrage games. The long distance phone system works this way, which is why it's still like $5 a minute to call India from the US, and "free conference call" systems set up in rural areas to juice incoming call revenue.
[+] [-] willio58|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbera|2 years ago|reply
The Korean government / ISPs justification for (effectively) removing net neutrality is that services such as Netflix/Twitch put an undue strain on the internet infrastructure that shouldn’t be borne by every user.
Of course while Netflix can raise prices to cover those fees, Twitch is free, so it can’t do the same.
I can see both sides of the argument here, but it is strange to me that the cost does not fall on consumers instead of the producers—the U.S. has had bandwidth caps for users for a several years.
[+] [-] SuperNinKenDo|2 years ago|reply
Maybe someone can find more info, since I'm replying on a device that makes actually looking this up a little tricky.
[+] [-] greyface-|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ejj28|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etc-hosts|2 years ago|reply
Customers of Twitch will be affected.
[+] [-] NanoYohaneTSU|2 years ago|reply
In order to help this they make all kinds of deals with governments. What I am getting at is without more information, I can't really tell if this is a good or bad thing. Companies that aren't profitable and use government to stay afloat should go out of business.
[+] [-] ookblah|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasubotadas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xpressvideoz|2 years ago|reply
One thing that makes AfreecaTV profitable is that it charges a fee for every donation happening in the platform. Twitch does not. AfreecaTV also uses a P2P network to reduce network cost. These policies may make the users and the streamers a bit annoyed, but it is still infinitely better than abandoning the service.
[+] [-] RCitronsBroker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thriftwy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rebelgecko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeroenhd|2 years ago|reply
VPNs and such will always allow Koreans to watch Twitch content, but by taking money or paying out revenue, Twitch as a company would create certain expectations of service. Now, with no special effort put into Korean service, I expect Twitch to become essentially useless. Perhaps the Korean localisation team will slowly let more and more untranslated English strings slip into the UI, though they may decide to keep the Korean translations for the benefit Korean minorities outside of Korea.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bastard_op|2 years ago|reply
For video, they generally reduce the video quality throughput, eventually reducing bitrate, causing buffering, and generally making your experience miserable unless Twitch, Youtube, etc pay the providers NOT to on behalf of their users. Cellcos particularly do this a lot to reduce quality so people aren't trying to watch 4k streams on a phone just because they can, it'll negotiate them down to what they feel is an acceptable like 480p, usually with some clause hidden in the fine print of your contract about acceptable use.
South Korea simply legitimized all their ISP's doing so, as much as Ajit Pai did repealing net neutrality for American ISP's as their puppet under Trump.
[+] [-] andrewstuart|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart|2 years ago|reply
What exactly are "network fees" in this context?
[+] [-] rsingel|2 years ago|reply
It's a terrible economic model that punishes peering. Cloudflare and Facebook moved most of their servers overseas to Japan. It's been a long running sh*t show, with lots of lawsuits between Netflix and S. Korea's biggest telecom.
And unfortunately EU Commissioner Thierry Breton wants to bring this model to the EU.