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Twitch can no longer afford to stay in South Korea
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Manuel_D 3y agoWhy didn't they just lower the allowed bitrates in Korea? That seems like a more reasonable option than just totally exiting.
- kadomony 3y agoThey already did that. 720. No one really wants to watch lower than that.
- Nthringas 3y ago[flagged]
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoI think that people that talk like this need to get a sense of perspective and perhaps reserve such vitriolic and dramatic language for actual problems instead of conversations about video resolution.
- Nthringas 3y agoactually, my argument is against digital rights management meaning digital exclusive property I'm aware that's a bit of a leap to get from "lowering quality" to "drm sucks and is a terrible idea", but as I see things, drm defeats the purpose of having an internet and it is an even bigger jump (at least 16-bits? ahaha) to understand the connection between twich and south korea (who pays for the bits?) it's remarkable how you critizice my 'lack of perspective', because your comment requires that I narrow my perspective enought that I can fill in the gaps in my own opinion such a way that you get what I'm trying to say
- konschubert 3y agoWhy is it so much more expensive in South Korea?
- lillecarl 3y agoBecause the sender pays for traffic
- konschubert 3y agoso the ISPs are sucking the life out of the market?
- Strom 3y agoIn some sense yes, but more precisely they have successfully lobbied the politicians to pass laws in their favor.
- konschubert 3y agoSo, yes.
- jnwatson 3y agoSee discussion from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539167
- nine_k 3y agoI hope this tax will help SK's internet services and audience thrive :(
- diob 3y agoBasically all about having a homegrown solutions for South Korea, so the money flows there rather than an international corporation. What will be interesting is if that homegrown solution is also used overseas, as then other countries will have to consider whether to retaliate with a similar "tax".
- konschubert 3y agoYou can have a homegrown solution but it won't have the content.
- cordellwren 3y agoMost apps widely used in Korea are homegrown. They have enough content to dominate the market.
- viraptor 3y agoWhy do you think so? It sounds like this pricing structure applies to any company, local or foreign. Or an I mistaken here?
- Scaevolus 3y agoOne of Korea's homegrown Twitch alternatives, AfreecaTV, uses AWS Cloudfront to serve video to users. Amazon wins either way.
- duskwuff 3y agoThat can't be cheap. How are they making that work, from a financial perspective, when Twitch couldn't?
- jmlim00 3y agoWhat I have heard was Afreeca makes use of distributed computing so that resources are shared directly between users rather than everything getting downloaded from their servers. This apparently cuts down on the amount of traffic load.
- darkwater 3y agoI don't agree with SK "Internet tax" concept but isn't it sweet that an Amazon-owned company suffers this end? Yeah, I'm looking at you, AWS egress prices and NAT-gw.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoFor the uninformed: AWS has pricing on NAT gateways that can only really be described as predatory. I personally saw a massive bill this year for sending data to and from a bucket in the same data center. In other words. I have a service. It’s in us-west-2. I have it sending a bunch of data back and forth between it and a S3 bucket, in the exact same data center. Unless you have some arbitrary checkbox checked in AWS, which absolutely should be checked by default and AWS has no literal reason to have it unchecked bedsides scammy, predatory practices, AWS will send you a massive bill to send bits entirely within their datacenter.
- dartos 3y agoI was speaking with an AWA engineer recently. Apparently most of the AWS services are things that Amazon teams needed and built, which is why the UX and options for them are all over the place. I’d attribute that checkbox to that rather than AWS evil. They also just have 0 incentive it make it better. Third parties like vercel do it for them at a premium.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoI would normally agree but this has been a known issue for years[0]. It would be trivial for them to change that setting. 0: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-managed-nat-gateway-is-unpleasant-and-not-recommended/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-managed-nat-gatew...
- voiceblue 3y agoIt might be “trivial” but in my experience most engineers at these companies are too busy trying to look good in order to either survive the next cut (particularly egregious at Amazon) or get promoted, and fixing this does neither. As Charlie Munger said: show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome.
- systemBuilder 3y agoThis is every telco evil empire's ultimate dream. Charge all customers twice! Let the second charge be pure profit which you can direct to the critically important expenditure of executive bonuses!
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoThe second charge being “pure profit” is just, not how accounting works.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoIt isn't accounting, it is economics.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoI wonder if this will have an effect like the 1983 motorcycle import tariff, either expediting adoption of more efficient codecs than avc1 or causing other markets to innovate around media formats or content preferences. When I found out Twitch streams are still (limited to?) 8000kbps nvenc/h.264 I was pretty surprised given how old and predominant HEVC and VP9 hardware support is.