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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

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?

SuperNinKenDo 3y ago
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.
- kijin 3y ago
  In Korea, broadband consumers only pay for the size of the pipe (100Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, etc.) and not for transfer. It's been like this for the last 20+ years. Even mobile carriers have "unlimited" plans. Short of outright collusion, nobody would dare comes up with a different pricing structure. Everyone would flock to a competitor! Moreover, the population is shrinking. The ISPs have little hope of increasing revenue from the "pull" side, which probably explains why they keep trying to pile charges upon the "push" side.
  - fomine3 3y ago
    It's common for consumer internet in many countries. What's different in Korea, dominance?
    - Xelynega 3y ago
      Market dominance is probably the reason. Canada had crown ISPs that offered unlimited data plans, so telcos has to do the same to compete and the idea of a fixed cap internet plan is rodiculous. When mobile data became popular there were no crown telcos anymore(other than SaskTel) so the prices started ridiculously high and were never brought down(other than in Saskatchewan)
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        > the idea of a fixed cap internet plan is rodiculous. Why? As far as I understand in Canada there are genuine costs incurred per extra bit of data transferred. Legal liability costs, peak congestion costs, etc... It may be a very very tiny amount per bit, but when multiplied hundreds of billions of times, they become noticeable costs.
rbera 3y ago
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.
- stephen_g 3y ago
  There aren’t two sides to the argument… The ISP’s customer is paying to access that data, adding another fee to the originator of the data is double dipping, plain and simple. I think it’s telling that generally the only network providers who can charge these fees are the ones with outsized market power - for example the largest ISPs in my country, such as Telstra and Optus don’t do any settlement free peering and charge everyone for transit to get bytes into their network. But the smaller ISP I’m on peers with Netflix and AWS and Microsoft and literally anyone who connects in to internet exchanges around the country, and funnily enough, even without charging content providers extra fees for data I’ve already paid for, my connection has better general performance, I pay a competitive fee compared to the other ISPs, and their network isn’t swamped by all the data…
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sankhao 3y ago
  I find it odd that twitch would rather shut down their service than simply stop offering a free tier. They already have an ad-free service called Twitch Turbo, surely enforcing usage in Korea wouldn't be prohibitively difficult. This makes me think that they are trying to spark outrage.
  - ryukoposting 3y ago
    Twitch's market share in Korea is very small. Domestic streaming services like Afreeca are the dominant player. If I had to guess, Twitch doesn't have enough users in Korea for a paywalled system to turn things profitable.

SuperNinKenDo 3y ago

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.

kijin 3y ago
In Korea, broadband consumers only pay for the size of the pipe (100Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, etc.) and not for transfer. It's been like this for the last 20+ years. Even mobile carriers have "unlimited" plans. Short of outright collusion, nobody would dare comes up with a different pricing structure. Everyone would flock to a competitor! Moreover, the population is shrinking. The ISPs have little hope of increasing revenue from the "pull" side, which probably explains why they keep trying to pile charges upon the "push" side.
- fomine3 3y ago
  It's common for consumer internet in many countries. What's different in Korea, dominance?
  - Xelynega 3y ago
    Market dominance is probably the reason. Canada had crown ISPs that offered unlimited data plans, so telcos has to do the same to compete and the idea of a fixed cap internet plan is rodiculous. When mobile data became popular there were no crown telcos anymore(other than SaskTel) so the prices started ridiculously high and were never brought down(other than in Saskatchewan)
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      > the idea of a fixed cap internet plan is rodiculous. Why? As far as I understand in Canada there are genuine costs incurred per extra bit of data transferred. Legal liability costs, peak congestion costs, etc... It may be a very very tiny amount per bit, but when multiplied hundreds of billions of times, they become noticeable costs.

rbera 3y ago

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.

stephen_g 3y ago
There aren’t two sides to the argument… The ISP’s customer is paying to access that data, adding another fee to the originator of the data is double dipping, plain and simple. I think it’s telling that generally the only network providers who can charge these fees are the ones with outsized market power - for example the largest ISPs in my country, such as Telstra and Optus don’t do any settlement free peering and charge everyone for transit to get bytes into their network. But the smaller ISP I’m on peers with Netflix and AWS and Microsoft and literally anyone who connects in to internet exchanges around the country, and funnily enough, even without charging content providers extra fees for data I’ve already paid for, my connection has better general performance, I pay a competitive fee compared to the other ISPs, and their network isn’t swamped by all the data…
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sankhao 3y ago
I find it odd that twitch would rather shut down their service than simply stop offering a free tier. They already have an ad-free service called Twitch Turbo, surely enforcing usage in Korea wouldn't be prohibitively difficult. This makes me think that they are trying to spark outrage.
- ryukoposting 3y ago
  Twitch's market share in Korea is very small. Domestic streaming services like Afreeca are the dominant player. If I had to guess, Twitch doesn't have enough users in Korea for a paywalled system to turn things profitable.