Bored on a uneventful night? Want to see some people play games? Want to see a fish playing pokemon?
Welcome to twitch.tv – a site designed to allow gamers to stream live gaming content – , where over 7 million logged in daily viewers watch a variety of streams. The site has recently been the site of a surprise purchase by amazon — for 1 billion dollars.
Twitch is a site designed on the concept of live media consumption. People called streamers produce live content, and can read live messages from a chat. The site makes it profit from ad revenue on the videos and promotions of games/channels. This has become very successful for many reasons. Many professional players stream for viewers, while many players simply want to entertain their viewers.
In a statement, the CEO of twitch stated that amazon “ believe in our community, they share our values and our long term vision, and they want to get us there faster.” Twitch is three years old, and already has held many major competitions in the growing esports community in addition to many streams that have garnered wide attention.
However, this decision that had come as a surprise to many (including myself). Rumors were floating around that google was poised to buy twitch, in an attempt to expand its successful video acquisition in youtube. The reason for this grab was to increase google’s share in the video business, as youtube’s live streaming service has largely flopped due to the lack of interest and the difficulty of use. According to business insider, twitch has 43.6% share of video live streaming. Multiple sites even reported they were in later talks for the merger, including reputed sites like forbes.
However, there is a large reason for amazon to purchase twitch. Amazon might not be buying smaller tech firms as frequently as google or facebook, but amazon has started a large video market with amazon prime and the kindle store, competing with other giants like netflix. Acquiring twitch gets them a solid base upon which they can grow their video business. In addition, this allows amazon to have a large audience for their new ad system, and a large enough base to make amazon ads a serious competitor for google ads.
All in all, this major deal is poised to help both twitch and amazon. Twitch will gain more viewers through amazon ads that will become prominent on twitch. Twitch will also get amazon funds.
By Ani Nrusimha
