Two South Korean streaming platforms are going global to compete with Twitch

A couple of South Korean streaming platforms are aiming to compete with Twitch on the international level following the site’s decision to shut down in the country.

On February 27, 2024, Twitch officially shut down in South Korea, with the platform’s CEO Dan Clancy blaming “prohibitively expensive” operating costs for the decision.

Now, the Amazon-owned streaming site may have inadvertently awakened new threats to its streaming crown while still in the midst of competing with Kick and YouTube.

According to a report from StreamElements and Streams Charts, South Korean streaming services AfreecaTV and Naver will be launching global platforms this year.

Naver, popularly known as Korea’s Google, has its streaming service CHZZK currently in beta, with plans to launch in May. Meanwhile, AfreecaTV will be rebranding as a global streaming platform called SOOP. Its beta is slated to be available in English at some point during the first half of the year.

For the first three months of the year, AfreecaTV was the most-watched Korean streaming platform with 105 million hours watched in January, while February and March each had 98M.

CHZZK has been steadily rising month over month, going from 25M in January to 47M in February and 59M in March. For context, when Twitch was still around in January, the platform had 68M hours watched.

Naver’s platform has even managed to surpass AfreecaTV’s in terms of active channels in March with 42K, 8,000 more than its rival.

Just like with Twitch, ‘Just Chatting’ remains a popular category for both platforms, being AfreecaTV’s most-watched, while it’s second on CHZZK, just behind MMORPG Black Desert Online.

Given the global competition in the streaming world already with Twitch, YouTube, Kick and Rumble taking a piece of the proverbial pie, it will be interesting to see how SOOP and CHZZK fare against their rivals.

Twitch’s guidelines allow streamers to multi-stream to other platforms already, so there won’t be anything stopping creators from trying their luck on the new Korean-owned platforms once they become available.