[DivisionSol]

Per: https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2023/12/05/an-update-on-twitch-in-...

  Ultimately, the cost to operate Twitch in Korea is prohibitively expensive and we have spent significant effort working to reduce these costs so that we could find a way for the Twitch business to remain in Korea. 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.

Korean implements a "Sending Party Network Pays" tax.

[musha68k]

Would be interesting to understand how far they got with the p2p experiments.

[belthesar]

I've never worked at Twitch, but I have experimented with P2P video delivery, and the TL;DR from my experiments is that real-time video delivery can not easily provide a consistent, low latency experience, and video experience problems amplify quite quickly. I wrote up a fair bit about this in the comments of a different HN post a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=33070218