[sankhao]

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.

[jonchurch_]

I think that would decimate their user numbers, which is a bad deal for the streamers too since they make money on sponsorships/ads and based on audience size. Hard to grow an audience when folks have to pay for the service. No idea how much of an average size streamer's income is based on donations on stream compared to brand deals. I wouldn't expect the average user to both pay for a sub to twitch, and also donate to the streamers.

I won't pretend to know what Twitch knows, but watching for free is definitely integral to how Twitch acquires users.

[acchow]

Doesn’t shutting off the service decimate their numbers more?

[thaumasiotes]

That's not obvious. If the pay-to-watch version of Twitch isn't viable, it will have no streamers and no users, but it will cost more than the we-no-longer-exist version.

[chii]

A fixed price tier cannot cover the full cost of that user's variable stream usage.

Twitch is unable to charge per hr streamed - nobody would accept that pricing, esp. if it was originally free.

Removing twitch from korea is the best move, since koreans are the ones losing out - which hopefully as a democracy, they elect someone to change this sort of lobbying from the ISP industry.

[ThatPlayer]

It might work short-term, but without a free tier, can they get enough new customers to replace subscriber loss over time? Otherwise they'll just slowly bleed subscribers until it's no longer profitable to run transit to and CDNs in Korea.

[ryukoposting]

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.

[JonathanFly]

According to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38539167#38539479 Twitch is the most popular streaming service in Korea, just slightly ahead of Afreeca.