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Ask HN: Is Kick.com somehow using Twitch to not have to pay bandwidth costs?

by Invertigrate on 6/17/23, 2:02 AM with 13 comments

For those not involved in the whole streaming scene, Kick.com is a huge rival to Twitch and they recently paid an insane amount of money (read $100M) to sign a contract for a streamer called XQC to stream on their platform.

I headed over to their site and saw that the user was doing their first stream and had >60k live viewers so I was curious to see where they were hosting their servers and when I looked the IP up (99.181.66.216), it said Twitch to my surprise.

Now I'm honestly baffled and are they somehow exploiting Twitch's embedded player to serve the content from them (do not that this streamer [XQC] is not streaming on Twitch at the same time, at least not using his regular account).

This is honestly the only theory I could come up with, but this shouldn't even be possible since CORS should stop it, right...?

Anyway, immensely excited to see if anyone here on HN knows what's going on because seeing a rival stream using their competitor's servers is mind-blowing to me.

  • by wmf on 6/17/23, 3:14 AM

    I think this is the answer: https://aws.amazon.com/ivs/ It's branded as an AWS service but it's delivered over the Twitch CDN.

  • by smoldesu on 6/17/23, 2:11 AM

    Twitch uses AWS to encode video, so the IPs may be identified as Twitch even if they're actually assigned to generic AWS address space. That's by best guess, I highly doubt this is a case of malicious abuse.

  • by 8chanAnon on 6/17/23, 5:28 AM

    Renting out bandwidth to the "competition" is not uncommon. It's not really competition when you're making money.

    >this shouldn't even be possible since CORS should stop it, right...?

    CORS is meaningless outside the controlled environment of a web browser. Besides, CORS is opt-in. Website operators can chose whether or not to share (it's in the name).

  • by Blahah on 6/17/23, 3:07 AM

    It's not exciting. Sorry. The services that identify ip addresses are using the same data as you. If someone using a provider is identifiable with their shitty heuristics, they will label them. If not it's labelled as the provider. There is not a conspiracy and not even a small reason to suspect malfeasance.

  • by Invertigrate on 6/17/23, 2:42 AM

    Now Kick is down - I wonder what happened.