Two South Korean streaming platforms are looking to rival Twitch on a global scale after the site announced its closure in the country.
On February 27, 2024, Twitch announced the closure of its operations in South Korea, citing “prohibitively expensive”operating costs as the reason for the decision. The platform’s CEO, Dan Clancy, expressed regrets over the shutdown.
Despite its ongoing competition with Kick and YouTube, the Amazon-owned streaming site may have unknowingly brought about new challenges to its dominance in the streaming industry.
It has been reported by StreamElements and Stream Charts that AfreecaTV and Naver, two streaming services from South Korea, are set to launch global platforms later this year.
Naver, often referred to as the Google of Korea, is currently in the beta stage for their streaming service CHZZK and is expected to officially launch in May. At the same time, AfreecaTV is undergoing a rebranding as a worldwide streaming platform named SOOP and is planning to release an English beta version sometime in the first half of the year.
Naver’s CHZZK service is growing fast already.
From January to March, AfreecaTV remained the most-watched Korean streaming platform with a total of 105 million hours watched in January and 98 million hours watched in both February and March.
Over the past few months, CHZZK has experienced a consistent increase in viewership. In January, the platform had 25M hours watched, which grew to 47M in February and 59M in March. To put this into perspective, Twitch, which was still operating in January, had 68M hours watched during that same time period.
In March, Naver’s platform had 42,000 active channels, surpassing AfreecaTV’s number by 8,000.
AfreecaTV and CHZZK have seen success with Twitch leaving South Korea.
Similarly, ‘Just Chatting’ continues to be a favored category on both Twitch and AfreecaTV, with it being the most-watched category on AfreecaTV and second only to MMORPG Black Desert Online on CHZZK.
With Twitch, YouTube, Kick, and Rumble already dominating the global streaming market, it will be intriguing to observe how SOOP and CHZZK will fare against their competitors.
Twitch’s policies currently permit streamers to simultaneously broadcast on other platforms, meaning there will be no hindrance for content creators to experiment with the newly launched Korean-owned platforms when they become accessible.
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