Amazon To Buy Twitch For $970 Million

Dave Knott (2917251) writes Amazon has agreed to acquire the live game-streaming service Twitch for approximately $970 million in cash, a move that could help Amazon bolster its position in the fast-growing business of online gaming and give it technology to compete with video-streaming rivals Netflix and YouTube. The acquisition, which has been approved by Twitch's shareholders, is expected to be completed by the end of the year. Google had for some time been reported to have interest in acquiring Twitch, but those talks cooled in recent weeks. Google was unable to close the deal, said sources familiar with the talks, because it was concerned about potential antitrust issues that could have come with the acquisition.

Sad

[DogDude]

I didn't know what Twitch was. Luckily, the NY Times had an informative article about it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08... [nytimes.com]

Jesus Christ. Humanity is doomed.

How long until every stream links to Amazon?

[_xeno_]

For those not familiar with Twitch, every stream contains a "Now Playing: (Game)" thing with it, and you can select which game you're playing from a pre-defined list of games.

Bets on how long until that become a link straight to Amazon to buy said game, and how long until streamers become Amazon affiliates and start getting money for driving people to buy their games off Amazon?

Because that's the only angle I can see Amazon having here: trying to get gamers to grab games off Amazon. (And they do sell digital game downloads, so they do compete with things like Steam.)

Maybe Amazon can fix some of Twitch's more recent problems like the horrendous stream lag that makes it impossible for streamers to communicate with the stream chat since the stream now has something like 30 seconds of latency between streamer and audience. Then there's Twitch's new weird anti-piracy thing where they mute audio if they detect that the audio contains a copyrighted song (hint: for video games, that's always) and whatever other issues people are complaining about Twitch these days since I never bother to use it.