Amazon and Twitch frequently talk about how Twitch is unprofitable and use it as an excuse to increase ad density. lower creator rev share, etc. Thing is, their unfprfitability is largely an accounting trick. Let's asy the compute cost for a stream is $50 and the ad revenue is $80 but there are two points in between: IVS and Twitch. Amazon could charge $50 for IVS and Twitch is super-profitable. Amazon could charge $90 for IVS and Twitch is losing money even though IVS is hugely profitable.
The reason I bring this up is that I'm skeptical about Amazon's claims of Twitch in Korea being unprofitable just like I'm skeptical of all of Amazon's statements regarding Twtich profitability. South Korea is a developed nation with robust netowrk infrastructure. I doubt egress bandwidth from South Korea is particularly expensive. If it is, Amazon is a large enough company to solve that with their own backhaul. AWS has a region in South Korea so encoding shouldn't be an issue.
In the last 2-3 years we've had a slew of reports from the likes of CVS and Walmart blaming theft on unprofitability in closing stores. This was and is a lie. It's used to mask rising costs, poor inventory management and bad execution.
So when I see an announcement like this I really have to ask "what failure is Amazon/Twitch really hiding?" because I'm convinced there is one.