Report: YouTube Buying Twitch.tv For $1 Billion 142
Variety reports that Google's YouTube unit has reached a deal with Twitch.tv to buy the game-streaming service for $1 billion. From the article:
"The deal, in an all-cash offer, is expected to be announced imminently, sources said. If completed the acquisition would be the most significant in the history of YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006 for $1.65 billion. ... YouTube is preparing for U.S. regulators to challenge the Twitch deal, according to sources. YouTube is far and away the No. 1 platform for Internet video, serving more than 6 billion hours of video per month to 1 billion users worldwide, and the company expects the Justice Department to take a hard look at whether buying Twitch raises anticompetitive issues in the online-video market."
So, my bet: (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why would regulators care at all about this deal? Twitch isn't a public company.
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Antitrust laws. Microsoft had trouble with them years back. The idea behind these laws is to promote competition between companies, so if a giant tries to buy their only competitor and become, effectively, a monopoly, the government can step in and block the deal.
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Because Twitch already has a history of anticompetitive behavior. Using your market dominance to force streamers to sign exclusive deals isn't exactly legal.
No-one really cares when Twitch does it but if YouTube keeps up the practice it is not unlikely that Daily-motion will ask EU to do something about it.
Publicly traded does not matter (Score:5, Informative)
Why would regulators care at all about this deal? Twitch isn't a public company.
Whether a company is traded publicly or not is irrelevant to anti-trust concerns. The only thing that being a publicly traded company means is that the stock is traded on an exchange. That's all. Many large companies are not publicly traded and anti-trust regulators are concerned with whether the merger will adversely affect consumers and competition in the market. Whether the stock is traded on a stock exchange is completely unimportant to the analysis.
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I'm not so sure publicly traded has anything to do with it. I'm still not seeing the connection to anti- trust suit it's not like there is a shortage of user content streaming sites. From what I could tell twitch is actually focused on games and game reviews which is more of a nitch site than general user content streaming site. I've never even heard of twitch before now but I have heard of daily-motion, vimeo, metacafe, and veoh. I know there are more sites.
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More importantly, Twitch and Youtube currently offer mostly different services ... so this adds a new service to Google, it doesn't extend a current one.
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I'm slightly confused.... is Youtube buying Twitch or is Google's wholly owned subsidiary (Youtube) buying Twitch?
The end result might be the same, but it seems to me that how the acquisition is reported should be relevant.
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Distinctions without differences (Score:2)
I'm slightly confused.... is Youtube buying Twitch or is Google's wholly owned subsidiary (Youtube) buying Twitch?
It's a distinction without a difference. YouTube is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. It would be equally accurate to say YouTube is buying Twitch, Google's subsidiary YouTube is buying Twitch, or Google is buying Twitch. In the end equation they all mean the same thing for all practical purposes. There are some subtle accounting ramifications regarding whether YouTube or Google actually is the the buying entity but nothing you or I will care about in the slightest.
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A "truly free market" is an anarchy, and the most powerful players will abuse their freedom to remove everyone else's freedom. Anarchy leads to feudalism. The only way that humanity has discovered to control the power of the powerful (and therefore to avoid feudalism) is to regulate it in a governmental structure.
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If your comments had any value then surely the free market would deal with the daily limit issue. Must be Nixon's fault somehow.
TwitchPlaysPokemon (Score:4, Insightful)
This channel has been suspended due to multiple copyright claims from Nintendo of America.
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Nah, it's ok, but next game is going to be full of "how is poky formed?"
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SQUARE ENIX is the same way. Their ToS over FF14 videos is pretty strict. They don't seem to be enforcing them right now but they could at any point.
Do what Blizzard did and allow big flexibility with using videos and images. It helps get the game out there everywhere. Blizzard even had a set of rules on how you can use images for your own personal website for the game.
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You realize Twitch pulls streams for DMCA complains quite often right? The site lives because the content creators don't complain, when they do their games get pulled. Pretty much the only time it happens is people trying to stream beta or pre-release versions of games.
wow... (Score:1)
it seems like the only one not making a billion dollars these days is me...
Twitch is not exactly a money maker (Score:2, Informative)
the amount of cash it costs to make live video is not cheap twitch is not really a money maker look at other game streaming sites they all went bottom up becouse of that reason.
twich doesnt have a ton of users compared to youtube and the biggest streams usually dont do twitch advertising but get sponsorship deals.
on the other hand google does have the servers available for it so if the rumour is true (which i doubt) it could be cheaper then expected to run the service
Re:Twitch is not exactly a money maker (Score:5, Informative)
Twitch.tv however has a lot of profitable users. People actually subscribe and pay money on monthly basis, PER CHANNEL and portion of that goes to twitch.tv.
Youtube on the other hand has a lot of users, but they are nowhere near as lucrative. It comes with twitch's role as a very specialized service.
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well using numbers from 2013 when i was hanging a lot with streamers twitch pays per 1000 views of an ad between 3 to 5 dollar (depending on the ad shown and the viewer location and other factors) to the streamer most streamers run about 3 ads in a block and do it between 1 to 3 times per hour.
sub buttons on the other hand is a one time fee per month of 4,99 of which you get 2,50
ads are actually way more profitable then the sub button for the streamer and for twitch
sub buttons are also pretty easy to get
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About Turbo, directly from Twitch:
" Pays broadcasters for invisible ads "
Re:Twitch is not exactly a money maker (Score:5, Informative)
- As someone else mentioned, Twitch Turbo users simply removes adds for the viewer, but does NOT affect the channel operator's ad revenue. Users get the "Turbo" icon in chat
- Channel subscribers get access to subscriber emotes in chat (usable across all of Twitch) in addition to the subscriber icon for that channel, and sub-only chat (if applicable - generally only streamers that have very high simultaneous viewers enable this, to keep chat usable for subscribers).
- "Transcodes", i.e. quality options of low/medium/high in addition to "Source", can become available when a channel reaches a certain threshold of simultaneous viewers. While having partnership can mean the streamer always has them, it is NOT required for transcodes to become available.
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You have no idea how Turbo works.
Turbo gives 100% fill rate for ads. Th
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As a friend who has over 1 million subscribers on Youtube and streams 20 hours per week on Twitch told me:
"Youtube is like Hollywoood, Twitch is Indie film."
Like you I would have guessed the opposite, but Youtube is much more lucrative for the content creator when your subscriber base is high.
Re:Twitch is not exactly a money maker (Score:5, Insightful)
The caveat is pretty hilarious though. "When subscriber base is high".
How many people can claim a high subscriber base? The entire point of Twitch is that it lets you monetize niche content that won't attract millions.
Re:Twitch is not exactly a money maker (Score:5, Informative)
Twitch picked up a lot of users recently though.
Between the PS4 and Xbone, both of which can stream and upload to twitch, that's probably at least a million content producers out there. And that doesn't include all the content producers twitch had to band for non-gaming-related content.
What will likely happen is a lot of that migrates to YouTube - so all those PS4 sex shows that were on twitch will just be on YouTube instead (since the PS4 doesn't, at least I don't think, support YouTube yet for content producers. You can watch YouTube videos, but you can't record with the PS4 and upload to YouTube. Though maybe the last update solved that).
And gamers will seek gamer content - if you're on the PS4 or Xbone, switching to YouTube to figure out how to defeat that boss is par for the course. In other words, there's a guaranteed audience looking for guaranteed content.
Hell, I'd like to watch twitch, but the 30 second beer commercials every 30 seconds got tiresome fast. (Especially for crap mass-produced American beer, and I don't drink, so it was wasted advertising money).
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(since the PS4 doesn't, at least I don't think, support YouTube yet for content producers. You can watch YouTube videos, but you can't record with the PS4 and upload to YouTube. Though maybe the last update solved that).
The PS4 doesn't support direct upload to youtube directly on the PS4....yet. You can, thanks to that 1.70 update, save to the hard drive, transfer the file to USB storage, then attach that to a PC for youtube upload.
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Well, on the upside, at lest Google has deep enough pockets to afford to pay Comcast/Time-Warner to stream Twitch at a decent rate. Pretty soon the only video most of us will be able to see without constant buffering will be Netflix, YouTube/Twitch, and maybe Amazon and Hulu.
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Isn't Twitch the official streaming app for the XboxOne? (Isn't there something there with PS4 too?)
I bet the deals that allowed those service hooks to happen helped lock-in some positive margin on those users.
What happened? (Score:1)
I thought only Microsoft and Apple bought companies for their technology? Google is doing it AGAIN?!?!
Where'z teh innovations!?!?!?!!1111?!
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Don't worry - they'll innovate this right into YouTube and G+!
(assuming the rumor of this deal is true, and it goes through)
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This could ROCK! (Score:3)
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Wish they would, even in the mobile app you cannot watch archived material; if it's not live you can't see.
All of Twitch is a 'Copyright Violation' (Score:5, Interesting)
Since by YouTube's standards, everything on Twitch is a 'copyright violation' (streaming footage of a video game and completely ignoring that most of it is Fair Use with added content) I really have to wonder how they intend to deal with the corporate trolls who are now going to descend on Twitch like the vultures they are.
I imagine that will involve giving most of the money currently going to the content creators to the copyright asserters. The RIAA model.
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many of the games you see on twitch are endorsed by the publishers, some even have built in twitch streaming in game so at the very least they will retain a huge user base just in those games without any worry. I also suspect most game developers wouldn't attach twitch because that would alienate them more than normal copywrite trolling does
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Same way they deal with the corporate trolls that are presumably all over their existing gaming channels on YouTube. I subscribe to five or six different Minecraft channels, two KSP channels, I've watched several GTA V playthroughs online, all on YouTube, all legit, all generating ad revenue.
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And then another Twitch will rise in its place.
Just like the other youtube...o wait.
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"All right guys you're about to get to watch us charge in! GET READY TO ROCK" *This stream brought to you by applewood meats, enjoy this 3 minute commercial*
Re: All of Twitch is a 'Copyright Violation' (Score:1)
Re:All of Twitch is a 'Copyright Violation' (Score:5, Informative)
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They do use flash though, which sucks. I've never understood why these new services use obsolete technology like this.
Embrace. Extend. (Score:5, Insightful)
Extinguish.
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Extinguish.
Why would Google extinguish it?
What does this mean for justin.tv? (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is from February:
Twitch today announced that Twitch Interactive, Inc. is replacing Justin.tv, Inc. as the company’s corporate umbrella name. Justin.tv will remain as a mature product of Twitch Interactive. The name change comes off of Twitch's continued growth, seeing now more than one million monthly active broadcasters and averaging 13 billion minutes watched per month.
So I guess it's in the pack.
In a related story. . . (Score:1)
In related news, it appears Yahoo still has cash reserves to spend on more failures.
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YouTube != Yahoo
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google owns youtube genius
Anticompetitive when its free? (Score:2)
How can it be anticompetitive when its a free service?
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Scintillating logic!
You should have been on Microsoft's legal team team during the IE anti-trust trail.
Not free: pay by watching ads. Only 1 TV network? (Score:2)
If CNN bought Fox News, MSNBC, and ABC would there be less competition in TV news? Of course. I don't see how payment or lack of payment has anything to do with whether or not two companies are competing .
That said, people DO effectively pay for YouTube and Twitch. You pay in the form of ads watched. Google converts those ad views to cash just as surely as they'd convert credit card numbers to cash if you paid by credit card.
Does Twitch really compete with YouTube? Probably not, but that's because Twitch
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Your second sentence seems to contradict the first. Microsoft never made any money from Internet Explorer. Making money has nothing to do with monopolistic practice, in fact monopolistic practices lose money all the time in order to maintain a lock on a more lucrative market. It's pretty much the definition. If someone's losing money (e.g. manufacturing consoles at a loss) then they are doing it in order to gain market share (possibly to acquire or maintain a monopoly) in something else (e.g. console games)
Should the competition be... (Score:1)
TwitchTV could use a tech infusion (Score:2)
Maybe google can find a way to make the video streaming less awful. They can hardly make it worse!
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Maybe google can find a way to make the video streaming less awful. They can hardly make it worse!
They will just have the automated copyright system flag everything and mass DMCA the lot. But look at the up side: No more buffering or stream delays!
Wow a fucking billion dollars aint shit today (Score:5, Insightful)
Back when I was a kid the last millenium (80-90s), a billion as a lot of money. It was a domain that only Bill Gates and a handful of other chosen few were allowed to occupy. Now every damn internet start up is getting a billion each at least, often in the double digits.
Shit with absolutely no real world business prospects to justify the price they command. Are we in Internet bubble 2.0?
Wow a fucking billion dollars aint shit today (Score:1)
Twitch.tv are pretty big. They can get 50-100k live viewers on dota 2 streams, which are typically hours long. That has to be worth something.
Re:Wow a fucking billion dollars aint shit today (Score:4, Interesting)
Twitch.tv are pretty big. They can get 50-100k live viewers on dota 2 streams, which are typically hours long. That has to be worth something.
Or League of Legends. That game can pull in over a million live viewers at times. Hell the "finals" last year pulled in over 32 million. Most TV broadcasts outside the Super Bowl can't pull that off.
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Million live views for a game stream sounds incredibly inflated. I'd like to see a bit of proof.
I understand that LoL probably has around 50 million players, but it would still mean, that one in fifty players would have watched that stream. This is a lot, at least when I compare to other big tournaments (Starcraft, MtG, etc.) and the amounts of people they pull in to watch their streams.
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They actually hit 8.5 million concurrent viewers in late 2013 for the LoL World Champions in late 2013. 32 million total viewers. They have 26 million players a day, 67 million a month.
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That is incredible. After learning that, I actually had to check what kind of prizes they are dealing out...
and now I can't even begin to fathom how much money Riot is making.
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If you're not part of the billion dollar club, then you're just a poor millionaire. Make less then that you say? You don't even fucking exist and not worth mentioning anyways.
The rich are at war with each-other, and the rest of us are just casualties in statistics.
Good morning gentleman! Have a biscuit on me.
~Anonymous.
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The actual meaning of exchange rates (Score:2)
Maybe it really isn't shit today and the US currency has actually devalued this much?
I think you may be confused about what currency devaluation means relative to other currencies. The mere fact that a dollar buys fewer Euros than it used to is only bad if you are trying import goods. If you are exporting goods (and we do a lot of that) then it means your products are more competitive. The Chinese have intentionally kept their currency relatively "weak" compared to the dollar in large part because it makes their exports less expensive compared with the competition. Japanese car companie
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That's a very shortsighted view and brought to you by the same people who tell you that inflation is a good thing as they help themselves to the wealth you earned.
Prove me (and Nobel laureates) wrong (Score:2)
That's a very shortsighted view and brought to you by the same people who tell you that inflation is a good thing as they help themselves to the wealth you earned.
If you think it is shortsighted, prove where my logic is wrong. Show how weakening currencies do not actually aid exports and strengthening currencies do not aid imports. When you do that, publish some peer reviewed papers and collect your Nobel Prize. (because if you actually can prove that you will win one)
Furthermore, nobody says "inflation is a good thing". Ideally we would want neither inflation nor deflation but that is impossible to ensure for a lot of reasons including because human populations
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You sell more shit but your shit gets less money. Try telling Amazon they should sell their $100 gift cards for $90 cause they'll sell more.
The best thing for businesses is a *stable* currency that allows them to plan for future sales, purchases and growth.
The government is the inventor of pissing on your shoes and telling you it's raining.
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It's the Japanese Yen and Chinese Yuan.
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Shit with absolutely no real world business prospects to justify the price they command. Are we in Internet bubble 2.0?
Twitch is currently profitable and has very real business prospects. They are actually competing quite well for viewers with TV, and that's pretty damned impressive for a site that streams people playing video games. For the young male demographic, Twitch outperforms quite a few of the larger cable TV stations in prime time and they are growing fast. They have very real business prospects, as long as something doesn't happen to derail them. The problem right now is that they are a victim of their own su
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Shit with absolutely no real world business prospects to justify the price they command. Are we in Internet bubble 2.0?
Video advertising is big money, which is why so many websites are scrambling to get video content lately. Twitch.tv, with an audience that actually watches commercials, absolutely could be making money, might possibly even be profitable already.
Really, sometime go check how much it costs per impression for a video ad.
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$1 Billion USD in 1988, would be $2 Billion today (2014). Not an astronomical difference... Those poor, poor $500 millionaires would be billionaires now. Big damn whoop.
No, only an extremely select few, and those are the ones you hear about in big stories like this one. Lots of successful startups get bought for far less, and most of it goes to pay off debts, leaving
Inflation (Score:2)
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pure entertainment (Score:1)
I haven't laughed so hard since Apple bought Beats.
Seems insignificant (Score:5, Funny)
right next to that 48.5 billion article doesn't it
Good for Twitch users (Score:2)
Google/YouTube? This can only mean one thing... (Score:5, Funny)
A Google+ account is required to comment on this DMCA takedown notice.
Re:Why is twitch popular? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, I don't even get why people watch athletics on tv. Talk about dull. I'd rather play the damn sports casually than just watch it on tv.
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I watch PA replays every now and again for the same reason I watch fencing.
As I enjoy it and I get to see where I am going wrong.
I don't watch football (Association, Rugby or America) as I find it dull, I can't relate to it in away way.
I'll have a kick about as it is socializing rather than "football".
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Re: Why is twitch popular? (Score:2)
I watch zisteau's inferno mines (and others) recently. Practically, i learn new techniques, ideas, etc.
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People watch it for the personalties or banter between streamers.
Pro tournaments can be fun to watch sometimes. Depending on who is casting they really understand the audience and it isn't always presented in the same style as a super serious 'sports' show.
People also like to watch and learn, see interesting things that they can try and copy or weird tactics that really only work under certain conditions. Its also nice to see some of the best players in the world thrown off by special tactics.
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OTOH there's a lot of people on twitch playing the game and saying nothing, that I don't understand. Boring.
Re:Why is twitch popular? (Score:5, Interesting)
Keep in mind most of the smaller streamers (and those tend to be the more entertaining to watch) are not e-sports try-hards. Their play is more casual. I tried a few of the bigger streams but yet, just watching someone team grind to keep their K/D is boring as watching golf.
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I can't answer for anyone else why exactly video game streams are currently the top grossing form of entertainment in the US *period* - but the fact is they are.
Grand theft auto 5 alone pulled in more money this year than any given form of entertainment. That includes movies, TV, books, you name it.
The various styles of game recordings (walk throughs, lets plays, streams, etc) taken as a whole compete quite well against other established forms of entertainment as well.
Asking if people are so depressed they
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I can't answer for anyone else why exactly video game streams are currently the top grossing form of entertainment in the US *period* - but the fact is they are.
Err, that was supposed to be just "video games" not "video game streams" there.
The streaming aspect is just a subset of the whole video game industry. There is still plenty of pie for that to be a nice slice of, but it's far from the top taken alone.
(Thanks slashdot for not letting me post a correction for for-ever after the original post! Will beta at least accept more than one hit per hour?)
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