South Korea has always been quick to recognize a gap in the market. When Twitch announced it would exit the country in late 2023, citing operating fees higher than anywhere else in the world, leading to existing platforms like AfreecaTV to absorb the displaced audience. However, South Korea's dominant search engine and digital ecosystem, Naver, would launch a competitor within days of Twitch's announcement — and it would grow, within the space of a single year, into one of the country's most-watched livestreaming services.
CHZZK is a Korean onomatopoeia for the sound of radio static, a naming choice that leans into the livestreaming character. The platform is operated by Naver, the technology conglomerate that functions as Korea's dominant search engine, and launched its open beta on December 19, 2023: days after Twitch officially announced their plans to depart from the market. The company clearly moved up their roadmap to fit Twitch's exit, and CHZZK's rollout came at the perfect moment when Twitch officially shut down its Korean servers.
CHZZK's primary market focuses on South Korea, leading to a near monopoly of Korean-language content on the platform. It skews heavily toward gaming and esports, though talk and variety content has grown rapidly and now consistently ranks among the most-watched categories on the service. While CHZZK is the newest of South Korea's major streaming platforms, its trajectory has been among the strongest in the recent history of regional livestreaming. The platform drew over hundreds of thousands of viewers daily within weeks of its launch, surpassed regional competitors in active channel count, and now is one of livestreamings most significant regional platforms.
What is Naver CHZZK and why was it created?
The story of CHZZK begins not with a slow-burning strategic plan but with a moment of competitive necessity accelerated by external events. Naver had long been the defining infrastructure of Korea's digital life — its search engine, news aggregation, shopping, webtoons and community boards form the connective tissue of Korean internet culture in ways that have no direct Western equivalent. But it had no livestreaming product of note at the start of 2023, and the Korean market's hunger for live video content was being met primarily by AfreecaTV and Twitch, whose Korean-language community was substantial and loyal.
The sequence of events that changed this began in December 2023. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy announced the platform would cease operations in South Korea by February, 2024, citing network infrastructure costs that made Korean operations unsustainable regardless of revenue. Within days, Naver began its closed beta test for a streaming service it called CHZZK. The open beta launched publicly on December 19, mere days after Clancy's announcement. The speed of Naver's response was not coincidental: the company had been developing the service for some time, and Twitch's exit provided both the market justification and the public moment to accelerate its launch timeline.
CHZZK also used the platform launch as an opportunity to define its content moderation philosophy more clearly than its domestic competitor had historically managed. The platform revised its terms of service to prohibit users with criminal records — including convictions for theft, assault, sexual crimes and child abuse — from broadcasting on the platform. This deliberate positioning reflected an awareness of the image challenges that other local platforms had accumulated over its nearly two decades of operation, and signaled that CHZZK intended to offer brands and creators a different kind of environment. The platform also introduced an age verification system for viewers, allowing streamers to mark their broadcasts as for adults only.
What content is popular on Naver CHZZK?
CHZZK's content ecosystem sits somewhat differently from its domestic rival. Where SOOP Korea's — formerly AfreecaTV — viewer base has long centered on a mixture of gaming and lifestyle content, with chatting and IRL streams playing a meaningful role alongside gaming, CHZZK's audience skews more consistently toward gaming and esports. This distinction has sharpened over the years, and while the talk (Just Chatting on other platforms) category is still popular and gaming content is indeed present on competitor platforms, CHZZK is a true gamer’s home for livestreaming.
Gaming content dominates CHZZK, and crucially, the platform offers a wide variety of gaming content for viewers. While platforms such as SOOP Korea consolidate their viewership across hundreds of categories, CHZZK regularly exceeds thousands of games and categories each month, with viewership spread across over 3,000 different titles. Just Chatting content — not represented on the above game-specific graph — represents one of the platform's largest categories by Hours Watched in 2026, a reflection of how the creator community that migrated from Twitch brought a diverse content range.
League of Legends content drives a substantial portion of CHZZK's viewership, as it does across every major Korean-language streaming platform. Eternal Return — a battle royale title that’s popular in Asia — and Dead by Daylight stood out as two of the fastest-growing games on the platform last year, and globally popular titles like Minecraft, Lost Ark, and PUBG: Battlegrounds also topped the charts here.
The 2026 Winter Olympics Games also attracted a strong audience on CHZZK. Naver Sports and CHZZK are designated as a primary platform for live-streaming the games, covering sporting events for Korean fans to cheer for their local atheletes. The games, which were hosted during February, received over 8.9M Hours Watched on CHZZK.
Can users from outside Korea use CHZZK?
CHZZK is, for all practical purposes, a Korean-domestic platform. Its content is almost entirely in Korean, access requires a Naver account, and for full functionality requires a Korean phone number or identification — a structural barrier that meaningfully limits organic international growth but provides local security. While the app is available internationally on iOS and Android, international users navigating a Korean-language interface will typically require a browser translation extension to use it meaningfully. CHZZK has not launched an international version, and there is no public indication that Naver is prioritizing cross-language expansion in the near term.
Naver's pre-existing user base provided CHZZK with a distribution network and authentication infrastructure that no new standalone platform could have built from scratch. Korean users already had Naver accounts, were familiar with Naver's payment systems, and were embedded in community structures — fan cafes, news feeds, search integration — that CHZZK could immediately plug into. This is CHZZK's most significant structural advantage over other regional competitors, and one that no amount of rebrand or UI investment can directly replicate.
Korean League off Legends esports tops the charts for Naver’s most-watched channels. It enjoyed a strong start to the year, and will earn tens off millions of Hours Watched by the end of the year and culmination of the season. Of the remaining top creators, nearly all of them migrated to the platform from Twitch, and most of them largely streamed gaming content.
VTubers also ranked highly among CHZZK’s top creators for the year. Some of these Virtual streamers migrated from Twitch, whereas others have launched directly on CHZZK to start their career. The platform has quickly become a native home to these creators, and has fostered new streamers joining action.
What makes CHZZK different? Features and strategic positioning
Naver's approach to CHZZK's launch revealed a clear understanding of what had made Twitch popular in Korea and what friction points had driven some Korean streamers and viewers to prefer it over the domestic alternative. CHZZK's user interface was intentionally designed to feel familiar to Twitch users and it launched with 1080p full HD streaming at 60 frames per second, directly addressing a major grievance of creators after Twitch had reduced Korean streams to a maximum of 720p. CHZZK also offered full VOD playback from launch, another feature Twitch had stripped from Korean users. In both technical specifications and design language, CHZZK was positioned as the seamless continuation of the Twitch experience on Korean soil.
To smooth migration further, Naver built a direct import tool: Korean Twitch users could link their Twitch accounts to CHZZK and transfer their subscription lists and follower records, minimizing the friction of switching platforms. Alongside this, Naver has committed plenty of cash to creator support programs, distributing funding to streamers as direct financial support. The message to creators was explicit: CHZZK would not only accommodate them but invest in them.
CHZZK’viewership comparison by the end of 2025, via our Q4 2025 Global Livestreaming Landscape
CHZZK's creator ecosystem includes a structured tiering system that governs both access and monetization. All new streamers begin as Rookies, gaining immediate platform access with minimal requirements. Advancement to Professional status requires meeting thresholds for followers, concurrent viewers and broadcast hours. Partner status is awarded by invitation only, and monetization terms — including revenue splits on donations, subscriptions, and advertising — vary by tier.
The platform's donation currency is called Cheese, functioning similarly to Twitch's Bits. CHZZK also operates Tongnamoo Power, a points-based viewer engagement system modelled after Twitch's Channel Points, which enables interaction during streams and has become a distinguishing feature of the viewer experience. All of these are deliberate choices to make the platform feel like a continuation of Twitch rather than a local alternative to it. For the portion of the Korean streaming audience whose primary frame of reference is Twitch, that design choice was the obvious one.
The most important strategic differentiator is not a feature at all — it is Naver itself. CHZZK exists within an ecosystem that includes Korea's dominant search engine, its most-used news platform, its most popular community boards, its shopping infrastructure, and its payments system. An additional integration with Naver Cafe — the platform's community board system — allows streamers to connect their broadcast channels directly to fan communities built within Naver's broader digital ecosystem. This integration creates a level of audience stickiness and cross-platform amplification that other platforms cannot meaningfully compete with on technical terms alone.
On the esports side, CHZZK has moved aggressively to lock in long-term broadcast rights that signal serious institutional ambitions. Most significantly, Naver secured exclusive Korean-language broadcast rights for the League of Legends Champions Korea from 2026 to 2030, as part of a joint agreement alongside SOOP Korea — one of the largest ever broadcast deals in esports history and comparable to major domestic broadcast deals in professional sports. For CHZZK, which had already been building an LCK audience through non-exclusive broadcast arrangements, this deal provides a guaranteed pipeline of the single most-watched esports content in the Korean market for the rest of the decade.
Naver also acquired exclusive South Korean rights to the Esports World Cup for three years, from 2025 to 2027. During the EWC 2025 League of Legends grand final, CHZZK drew over 360,000 Korean-language viewers to establish itself a prominent esports figure. Starting in 2026, CHZZK and SOOP Korea have exclusive broadcast rights to the LCK, meaning YouTube is no longer a competitor here.
CHZZK in 2026: Current standing and what comes next
As of early 2026, CHZZK has grown quickly in the Korean market, and its competitive position relative to SOOP Korea has tightened in ways that would have seemed improbable two years ago. In early 2026, CHZZK led SOOP Korea in active channels though SOOP maintained a slight edge in average concurrent viewership. Peak viewership in that month tilted in CHZZK's favor — fuelled by LCK viewership — and it boasted a wider assortment of gaming content: by the most relevant metrics, the two platforms operate at comparable scale, a remarkable outcome for a service that did not exist before December 2023.
The LCK exclusive deal beginning in 2026 is arguably the single most consequential factor in CHZZK's near-term trajectory. League of Legends viewership has historically been the most reliable driver of peak concurrent numbers on Korean livestreaming platforms, and the structural guarantee of exclusive domestic broadcast rights for the most-watched esports league in the world provides CHZZK with a content anchor of a kind that is very difficult to displace. Combined with Naver's ecosystem integration and CHZZK's now-established creator community, the platform enters the next phase of its development from a position of genuine competitive strength rather than challenger momentum alone.
Whether CHZZK extends its ambitions internationally, and how it navigates the inevitable pressure to monetize its audience more aggressively as growth levels off, are the open questions heading into the mid-2020s. For now, it remains one of the most significant platform launches in the recent history of regional livestreaming — a case study in how quickly a well-resourced company with an existing ecosystem can establish a major position in a market that seemed, until very recently, like someone else's.
CHZZK's place compared to other platforms at the end of 2025, via our Q4 2025 Global Livestreaming Landscape Alongside SOOP Korea, CHZZK stands at the head of the non-major Korean livestreaming market. The two platforms together dominate Korean-language streaming viewership, leaving services like NimoTV and Bigo LIVE far behind in the regional standings. Their rivalry, which plays out across creator recruitment, esports rights, and product feature development, is now the defining competitive dynamic of one of the world's most digitally active streaming markets — and one of the more fascinating to track for anyone interested in how regional platforms compete in the shadow of global giants.
Frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know about Naver CHZZK and the Korean streaming market:
Why did Twitch exit South Korea, and how did it affect the Korean streaming market?
Twitch CEO Dan Clancy reason network infrastructure costs — specifically, operating fees that were higher in South Korea than anywhere else in the world — which made Korean operations financially unsustainable. This vacuum left behind by Twitch in the Korean streaming market rapidly accelerated the launch of CHZZK, and prompted existing platform AfreecaTV (now SOOP Korea) to absorb displaced the Korean-language community. The event reshaped the entire streaming platform comparison Korea landscape within weeks.
What is CHZZK, and who operates it?
CHZZK is a livestreaming platform operated by Naver — South Korea's dominant search engine and technology conglomerate. It launched its open beta in December 2023, just days after Twitch officially announced its departure from the South Korean market. The platform was designed to feel familiar to Twitch users and with features deliberately shaped around the Twitch experience, making migration as frictionless as possible for displaced Korean streamers and viewers.
What content is most popular on CHZZK?
Gaming content dominates CHZZK, with viewership spread across more than 3,000 different titles each month — a breadth that distinguishes it from competitors. League of Legends is the single largest driver of CHZZK viewership, reflecting its dominance across all Korean-language streaming platforms. Other top-performing games are available to explore on our Games tab with the CHZZK filter.
What makes the Naver ecosystem a strategic advantage for CHZZK?
Naver operates South Korea's dominant search engine, most-used news platform, popular community boards (Naver Cafe), shopping infrastructure, and payments system. Korean internet culture is deeply embedded in these tools, meaning the vast majority of CHZZK's target audience already had Naver accounts, was familiar with its payment systems, and participated in community structures that CHZZK plugged directly into.
How does CHZZK compare to SOOP Korea in Korean streaming market share?
As of early 2026, the two platforms operate at broadly comparable scale. The competitive gap has tightened sharply since CHZZK's launch, and it now leads SOOP Korea in active channels and breadth of gaming content, while SOOP maintains a slight edge in average concurrent viewership. In terms of Korean streaming market share, the two together dominate Korean-language livestreaming.
Can users outside South Korea access CHZZK?
Technically yes, but in practice CHZZK is a Korean-domestic platform. Its content is almost entirely in Korean, and full functionality requires a Naver account along with a Korean phone number or national identification. International users navigating a Korean-language interface typically need a browser translation extension to use the platform meaningfully.