Any idea why south korea is particularly cost prohibitive? i would assume twitch would be very keen to have a presence there.
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.
tl;dr is that SK has some big fees for data users that have a disproportionate impact on non-Korean companies
These entrenchment laws are there to favor the big ISPs in SK, it would stand to reason that they would be happy to make money in such an arrangement, and Twitch gets a secondary downstream benefits that they can reap.
I'm willing to bet there was no real diligence to an idea like this as a result. I was of course postulating myself (and don't know the inner details of Twitch either) however, upon thinking about it further, it seems unlikely it was ever seriously entertained, if at all.