Twitch started to use P2P technology in Korea | Hacker News Reader

Twitch started to use P2P technology in Korea

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15 pointsssut7 comments

>associated rising costs of operating in Korea

are they trying to make me believe Korea, place of one of the fastest internet on the planet has especially expensive transit cost for 10Mbit streams? compared to US? :) Or maybe its because its common to have symmetrical 1Gbit at home there and we had to come up with some kind of excuse?

Is it this? https://thediplomat.com/2021/08/netflix-and-sk-broadband-bat... Are they silently taking it in the rear (or rather passing it onto consumers) instead of sending lawyers after ISPs?

> Are they silently taking it in the rear (or rather passing it onto consumers) instead of sending lawyers after ISPs?

This is one of leading theories right now. The transit cost in Korea is indeed relatively high so the content providers do have higher pressure [1].

[1] https://opennet.or.kr/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/intro-and-Q... (a transcript of the seminar on Korean net neutrality, hosted by Open Net Korea on Nov 2021)

Looks good assumption. I also came up with IPv6 adoption rate because it helps P2P connectivity, but it seems that Korea's adoption rate isn't good. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

I hope they'll pay users for supporting their infrastructure

Imagine getting ads as a reward for helping them reduce load on their servers

> How does peer-to-peer impact my privacy?

> In order to create a peer-to-peer (P2P) connection, it is necessary for Twitch to make the IP address of each participant available to the other. It may be possible for a highly motivated and technically proficient person to discover participants’ IP addresses, which could potentially be used to approximate location. Viewers who have privacy concerns with P2P can watch streams in 720p to avoid any IP sharing risk.

Ouch, P2P voice chat on steam back in the days was source of ton of DDoS issues

If you don't want your IP address exposed, watch our content in shit quality... Yeah this sounds about right for Twitch in 2022.

Does Twitch even save preferences on quality? So if you go into a stream, isn't it auto by default? Do they have a setting in preferences (I can't see it in the app, but maybe on web)? Otherwise it could auto to HD and expose IP addresses.

I'm very suspicious that while the FAQ says this test phase only affects the non-mobile web [1], it also says "data (3G/LTE/5G etc.) costs may be incurred". So they are perhaps willing to enable P2P in the mobile web as well under the favorable condition?

[1] Not clearly worded in English, but the Korean version explicitly mentions "PC".

To be fair to Twitch, you cannot reasonably infer short of noting which IP addresses are used for mobile providers and which IP addresses are used for fixed-line, and of course differentiate between metered (most US for example) and unmetered fixed-line communication. It's a warning if you use tethering, not if you use their apps on mobile.

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