South Korea has long been one of the world's most promising grounds for livestreaming culture. Long before Twitch became a household name in the West, Korean audiences were already spending hours watching creators broadcast their daily lives, host talk shows, and commentate on competitive gaming matches in real time. At the center of that ecosystem, for nearly two decades, was a platform called AfreecaTV: today known as SOOP. SOOP Korea stands at the center of both the history of digital broadcasting in East Asia and the strategic pressures reshaping it right now.
While not alone within the South Korean livestreaming scene, SOOP Korea is the oldest standing platform for live broadcasting, and its history within Korea’s highly digitalized place in the modern era has left it with decades of operation experience. Livestreaming in Korea has a deep connection to gaming culture — as is true around the globe — and gaming and esports events remain some of SOOP’s most popular content throughout the year.
While both casual and competitive gaming content remains highly popular on SOOP Korea, it has also embraced the modern era of livestreaming by supporting creators operating under chatting or IRL categories. Although this content remains highly popular, its presence is not as dominant as on other global livestreaming platforms, such as Twitch or TikTok. To put its scale in perspective: in 2026, SOOP Korea maintains tens of thousands of active channels a month, and can reach over half-a-million concurrent viewers. For Western observers, these figures may not seem extraordinary against Twitch's global numbers, but within the Korean-language livestreaming ecosystem, they represent a significant portion of the country’s online livestreaming traffic.
Why was SOOP Created? The origins of AfreecaTV
SOOP is a South Korean livestreaming platform operated by SOOP Co., Ltd., the result of a comprehensive corporate and brand rebrand from AfreecaTV Co., Ltd. carried out in 2024. The platform launched in its original form on May 11, 2005, making it one of the oldest continuously operating livestreaming services in the world.
The story of SOOP begins not with a boardroom strategy but with a genuinely novel idea for its time. The platform launched in 2005 under the name "Afreeca", an acronym standing for Any FREE broadCAsting. The concept was simple and, at the time, radical: give ordinary people the tools to broadcast live video to an audience over the internet, without requiring the infrastructure of a television network. In 2005, this was a genuine democratization of live media production in a country with some of the world's fastest home internet connections and a population hungry for interactive digital entertainment.
In its earliest years, Afreeca blended user-generated livestreams with re-broadcast television content and community chat channels. It was a hybrid model that anticipated many of the features now considered standard in the livestreaming industry. The platform grew steadily throughout the late 2000s, and in 2011, the original operating company — Nowcom — restructured its business, spinning out the livestreaming division into a dedicated entity called AfreecaTV Co., Ltd. This reorganization gave the platform both corporate focus and strategic independence to develop its creator ecosystem more aggressively.
The first of its kind, Afreeca developed a monetization system built around virtual gifts called "Star Balloons", which allowed audiences to send financial support directly to their favorite broadcasters in real time — a model that predated and arguably inspired similar mechanics adopted by Western platforms years later. As a forerunner in monetized livestreaming, AfreecaTV grappled with issues such as streamers engaging in dangerous content for donations, pushing the boundaries of the terms of service, and otherwise damaging the public perception of the platform. As a forerunner in the industry, the story of this South Korean platform was followed by other global sites years later.
AfreecaTV became genuinely dominant in the South Korean digital media space. By 2019, the platform had earned recognition in Forbes Asia's list of Asia's 200 Best Under a Billion companies, a milestone that marked its arrival as a regional media business of genuine commercial significance.
The transformation into SOOP came in 2024 and was far more than a cosmetic rebrand. The new identity emerged in a specific and consequential market context: Twitch, the dominant Western livestreaming platform, announced its exit from the Korean market in early 2024, citing prohibitive operating costs driven by South Korea's network usage fee regulations. That exit left a meaningful gap in the Korean streaming ecosystem, particularly among gaming-focused creators and their audiences who had migrated to Twitch during past years. SOOP's leadership recognized this as both an opportunity and a moment to reset the platform's identity.
Its primary market remains South Korea, though a distinct service called SOOP Global targets international audiences with an English-language interface. The platform's content skews heavily toward gaming, esports, and community-focused entertainment, and its creator ecosystem spans tens of thousands of active streamers across a wide range of categories.
Who uses SOOP Korea, and what do they watch?
SOOP's content ecosystem is broad, but it has clear gravitational centers. Gaming and esports remain the platform's dominant categories by both volume and viewership, a reflection of South Korea's long-standing position as one of the world's premier gaming cultures. The platform streams live esports events and gameplay commentary, walkthroughs, and competitive analysis across titles including League of Legends, Valorant, and StarCraft. SOOP's own in-house esports production capabilities are worth noting specifically: the platform's SOOP Valorant League event drew approximately draws tens of thousands of viewers every year, making it one of Valorant’s premiere off-season tournaments.
Beyond esports, SOOP Korea hosts a wide variety of casual gaming content, featuring global titles like Minecraft, as well as regional favourites such as MapleStory. The platform also hosts much lifestyle and chatting content, personal broadcast streams, and an emerging virtual content category. The "Virtual" content segment — which includes VTuber programming and related creator formats — grew rapidly throughout 2025, ending the year as one of the platforms top categories and raking in 10M Hours Watched on a monthly basis.
The creator side of SOOP skews toward independent broadcasters rather than large media organizations, though the platform has integrated professional esports production that blurs the line between creator content and broadcast-quality event coverage. While there no single "banner" creators whose fame has crossed cultural boundaries into international audiences, many of SOOP’s top streamers have been active for years and command loyal and highly engaged followings.
To name some who are still topping the charts as of 2026; Kim “김민교. (phonics1)” Min-kyo, Kim “감스트 (devil0108)” In-jik, otherwise known as Gamst, and Lee “철구형2↑ (y1026) Ye-jun — critically, all of these streamers have strong roots in gaming.
Where is SOOP Korea popular?
SOOP's core audience is, by design and by content, concentrated in South Korea. The Korean-language streaming ecosystem is a distinct and self-sustaining market, and SOOP — alongside Naver's competing service, CHZZK — accounts for a dominant share of Korean-language streaming hours globally.
Internationally, SOOP's footprint is growing but still developing. Through their sister platform SOOP Global, the platform appeals to a viewership across Southeast Asia for gaming content in particular. While SOOP Global has not broken through into meaningful engagement in North American or European markets, and its brand recognition outside East and Southeast Asia remains limited, it functions to expose the SOOP brand to a wider global audience.
SOOP in 2026: Current standing and what comes next
As of early 2026, SOOP occupies an interesting and somewhat contested position in the Korean livestreaming market. Its rebrand from AfreecaTV successfully modernized the platform's identity and UI, and the departure of Twitch from Korea handed it a meaningful opportunity to consolidate gaming audiences who had previously gravitated toward the American platform. At the same time, the competitive landscape has sharpened considerably. Naver's CHZZK, which launched as a well-funded competitor with Naver's considerable resources behind it has been a threat to SOOP’s dominant position.
Currently, CHZZK has overtaken SOOP Korea in terms of active channels, although SOOP maintains a slight advantage in terms of viewer count. To contextualise and illustrate the competition between these two platforms, take a look at their viewership statistics for Janauary 2026.
| January 2026 statistics | SOOP Korea | Naver's CHZZK |
|---|---|---|
|
Active Channels |
30 822 |
43 936 |
|
Average Viewers |
153 273 |
134 685 |
|
Peak Viewers |
468 476 |
531 307 |
SOOP Korea’s ongoing focus areas entering the mid-2020s include deepening its esports integrations and production capabilities, expanding its short-form ecosystem which has been gaining traction, and cementing its dominant position in the modern Korean livestreaming market. While Naver’s CHZZK represents a strong competitor in the market, SOOP Korea has long been a part of Korean livestreaming through its past life as AfreecaTV, and it shows no signs of exiting its major position in this industry.
Excluding industry giants such as Kick, Twitch, TikTok, and Kick, Korean livestreaming platform SOOP Korea stood at the head of the livestreaming industry. While the competition with CHZZK remains close, SOOP Korea was able to maintain a significant lead at the end of the year, and both rivals stood a cut above the rest of the livestreaming industry, including platforms like Rumble, supported largely by American audiences, and other Asian sites like NimoTV.
SOOP's story — from Afreeca in 2005 through AfreecaTV's domestic dominance to the SOOP rebrand in 2024 — is ultimately a case study in how a platform navigates the long arc of digital media evolution: surviving the arrival of well-funded global competitors, adapting to shifting content norms and regulatory environments, and finding the right moment to reinvent itself without alienating the audience that made it viable in the first place. Whether its global ambitions will materialize into a genuinely international platform or whether it will remain primarily a regional Korean-market leader is a question the next few years will answer. For now, it remains one of the most historically significant and interesting platforms in the global streaming ecosystem — and an essential reference point for anyone trying to understand how digital media culture has developed.
