Introduction
A live streaming video platform owned by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon.com
To simply put, Twitch is a live video streaming service focused on games, like Afreeca TV which is one of the most popular video streaming service. Twitch mostly provide streaming online game broadcasting about Hearthstone, LOL, Overwatch and etc. Google and Amazon were competing each other to buy Twitch and eventually Amazon bought Twitch just under $1 billion. Twitch ranked the 4th largest in the US for peak Internet traffic (following by Netflix, Google and Apple). Twitch has higher peak Internet traffic than Facebook, Amazon and Tumbler which are well-known websites. In Korea, Twitch is not that well-known even it is pretty popular in the US. Yet, thousands ISPs are already Twitch’s peering members in Pacific-Asia area, and many other ISPs want to be peer members with Twitch.
Background
Twitch ranked fourth in peak Internet traffic for US
One of the challenges for video streaming service providers is the expensive price of transit.
As I mentioned before, Twitch ranked fourth in peak Internet traffic for US and this means Twitch was paying a significant amount of money just for transit. Twitch was searching for a way to reduce transit costs economically and reached at KINX for local peering service.
What did KINX do?
Local peering with network redundancy at KINX backbone network
Twitch is using KINX local peering service with 10G port and circuit redundancy; in general, one is active circuit and the other is stand by circuit. Yet, Twitch set 2 active circuits so that it can provide fast, stable and reliable video streaming service to its viewers. This allows to prevent unexpected traffic congestion and enhances the quality.
Effect
Autonomous network management through settlement free policy
1. Autonomous network operation One of the issues of using a transit is the ownership of the network belongs to the telecommunicator not the user, while network ownership, while KINX’s settlement free policy allows users to have full ownership.
2. Cost reduction Peering costs a bit more, since the ISP will have to pay for a port and the line to connect to the other network, but over an established peering connection there is no additional cost for the traffic. The cost of transit traffic is the most expensive. The ISP will have to estimate how much traffic it needs, and any extra traffic will cost extra. Based on our experience, KINX local peering is much cost-effective than using transit.
3. Internet service quality improvement Peering can significantly improve the quality of the Internet service, since traffic peered directly provides the shortest path between two networks.
“While well-known major 3 ISPs in Korea provides L3-based network only,
KINX is the only L2-based network provider.
I think KINX provides more flexible and reasonable network
services than the major ISPs.”
Brain Kim – Technical Business Developer, Twitch
