Twitch to shut down in Korea over ‘prohibitively expensive’ network fees::Twitch, the popular video streaming service, plans to shut down its business in South Korea on February 27 after finding that operating in one of the Twitch plans to shut down its business in South Korea after network costs became “prohibitively expensive” in the leading esports market.
IIRC the Korean ISPs wanted websites that incur a lot of bandwidth, like Netflix and Twitch, to pay a “usage fee” for all the strain they were causing on the network. Which is absolutely ridiculous – they basically want more money while still charging customers subscribed for Internet.
Twitch did the right thing here in not paying. I think they also limited streams to 720p in Korea and there was a lot of backlash about that as well, but apparently nobody was bothered enough to kick up a storm about it to the ISPs. Which is sad, because you’re getting a subpar experience with the Internet line you paid good money for, all because of the greed of ISPs.
Sadly Korea only has like three ISPs anywhere to get Internet service, so you either go with their shots or get no Internet.
Only one high speed isp in my area. Shoot, I’ve lived in various places up and down the mid Atlantic and after dial up fizzled Comcast was always the only decent game around. I could do LTE now, but its still not as good as Comcast. 250mbps down, 10 up for $90/mo
