Does anyone know why it's so expensive there?
this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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Lack of net neutrality is a huge part of it. Korean ISPs bill sites like twitch for the data they use.
This is good ammo for the fight for Net Neutrality, honestly.
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 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.
SPNP - Sending Network Party Pays
The party that creates the traffic pays the operating costs.
Damn I didn’t know it was 10x the cost. Crazy how a company that size still can’t handle the fees.
more a matter of “don’t wanna” than “can’t”
It says they operated at a loss in SK. If that's true, I wouldn't wanna, either.
I also didn’t know that South Korea charges extra for foreign content providers which is also pretty aggressive.
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.
There's no "don't wanna" unless there's a "can't" due to not being able to make a profit. If they could they would. It's simple as that.
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?
Because an organization or person only has so much bandwidth and attention. You can't infinitely scale to grab every bit of profit.
"Tripping over dollars to pick up pennies."
While true, that's not exactly relevant when it's a choice between losing a lot of money and not losing a lot of money.
10x the cost of what tho? They just say "most other countries", but tahts just spin and essentially meaningless without more data
That is surprising forthcoming from them.
Couldn't Koreans just VPN to another country?
No need. Asian countries are not blocked from using Twitch. It's just Twitch won't have local business in Korea now.
VPNs aren't the solution to shitty laws, nor can you expect that to be a valid mass solution
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.
What's funny is Korean VPNs would be paying the fees to the ISPs instead, lol. ISPs still get their money.
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.