Twitch exit from S. Korea is latest fallout from “sending-party-pays” model

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Amazon-owned Twitch plans to stop providing its streaming platform in South Korea, saying that fees charged by network operators make it impossible to run the service without a significant loss in the country.

The shutdown is scheduled for February 27, 2024, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy announced on Tuesday. Transmitting data in Korea "is prohibitively expensive" despite the company's efforts to reduce data usage, he wrote.

"First, we experimented with a peer-to-peer model for source quality. Then, we adjusted source quality to a maximum of 720p. While we have lowered costs from these efforts, our network fees in Korea are still 10 times more expensive than in most other countries. Twitch has been operating in Korea at a significant loss, and unfortunately there is no pathway forward for our business to run more sustainably in that country," Clancy wrote.