Twitch is slashing stream quality in South Korea

Twitch has been at the forefront of streaming culture for years, providing highlights from famous streamers and live streams across various forms of content.

But the live stream giant has been struggling to keep up with the costs of managing the platform in South Korea, meaning that Twitch will have to cut costs to manage rising prices.

YouTube’s streaming competitor explained why it made the changes in a recent blog post on Sept. 28. The post details the changes and what other solutions are available in the near future. 

South Korean Twitch blames “networking fees and other related expenses” for being the thorn on its side as the company tries to comply with the local regulations that the country requires.

As a solution, South Korean Twitch will be limiting the stream quality to 720p “on channels where transcode is provided” on Sept. 30.

Twitch uses transcodes to assist its audience in choosing what quality they want to view their desired content. Essentially, transcoding occurs when a file is converted from one encoding format to a separate format. 

This is all in an attempt to continue its operations in Korea. Twitch has already been testing an alternative, peer-to-peer streaming, to combat the problem. Twitch wants to test further before implementing it, however.