Confirmed: Amazon Has Purchased Twitch

Coming from someone who worked for Amazon. Their company philosophy could be very bad for Twitch.. We'll see..

I think it's more honorable to take ownership. They would have been more than fine without Amazon. They were already a contender and then they handed what they had to the highest (or second highest) bidder.

It is a fuck ton of cash. Can't imagine many people would be able to say no to $970 million. It's just an absurd amount of money. Stupid big.

i find this absolutely stupid. i stream on twitch and get paid to my paypal with the aquisition of twitch going to amazon that will close any further payment to my paypal due to the fact amazon doesnt work with paypal. quickly ruining my home job. amazon = no job

That ahole emmett shear is younger that me fml

That's not a guarantee. Any changes in operations based on the Amazon acquisition have yet to be announced, if any are indeed coming.

wow, I honestly was expecting Youtube/google buying them, well Amazon has their cloud storage and streaming tech that could make it interesting.

I have the feeling that when the talks "cooled" down between Twitch and Google, an issue could be all the copyright liability they will bring to Google, because lets be honest here, once they are acquired by a big company the other big companies will try to sue Google for copyright infringement so I guess the quick response from Twitch to be more attractive to buyers was to deploy their content id and muted streams.

I know most people hate Google because of YouTube's content id and I agree, it is lame but at the same time, in some parts Google is ahead on the streaming technology which I would like to see in Twitch. Amazon doesn't have experience in it so unless they do more R&D I think what is going to happen is hooking Amazon ads and "Buy this streaming songs from us" or "Buy this game" will be all over the place.

Long time ago I had a great experience with Amazon but now that I have experienced their service outside of Amazon USA, it is lacking and sometimes pretty bad. For example here in Japan you cannot use the App from Playstation 3/4. You cannot read the ebooks you buy on the web, only on Android and Kindle. You can stream video but you cannot download it as they download software doesn't work for this region and so on, on the other hand, Google is pretty much the same here and in USA.

Anyway, hoping for the best.

Amazon's come a long way, baby.

This is good news that Amazon is buying Twitch instead of Google, but what about the muting of videos on demand with copyrighted music in the background?

The muting of the music is incredibly annoying as someone who is only able to watch saved on demand content. The policy was a very "Google-like" move, and as Twitch is bring bought by Amazon now, where does this put the new policy on copyrighted music in video? Was the policy a result of initial talks with Google, or was it something the team at Twitch alone thought was the right thing for their customers?

Fuck Amazon! I'll continue to buy from them (because a lot of great people continue to use their services - and they actually have one of the most ingenious business models of the last century)... but some of their business practices make me sick. Hopefully this won't affect Twitch much though.

Definitely better than Google. It's a big step in preventing a monopoly for one thing. All twitch really needs is the financial backing to improve its infrastructures and not get demolished in court in the inevitable lawsuits it will face and Amazon can do that as well as google. And unlike google, not everything amazon touches turns into actual shit. That last one is a big plus.

@sub_o: There's probably a demographic study out there where that makes sense.

This is essentially my thought on it too. If Google snapped them up it would have given Google a dominating lead on internet streaming across the planet so Amazon buying up Twitch means more competition. Whether that harms or benefits Twitch in the long run remains to be seen.

@aaronmason89: I guess you'll have to get a real job then, huh?

I feel way better about this than Amazon, even though they might go in the exact same direction.

Oh woah that's pretty cool. Thanks for the scoop Scoops! =)

Don't care who bought it as long as they make it work. Twitch is consistently one of the worst viewing experiences online for me.

Interesting. I wonder what this will mean for all those new restrictions on streaming background music etc. that came in.

I've thought about recently trying to stream, I doubt you can make that much money though, unless you get thousands of viewers. Of course, I would probably average about... 10... viewers. Unless I actually make an ass out of myself promoting my stream everywhere.

If only all it took was being entertaining and people would magically find you.

Really am glad Google didn't get them. Need healthy competition to keep all competitors striving to better their service.

I cant even imagine what $970 million dollars looks like

Definitely agree with this -- barring any future changes Twitch makes themselves, a la their recent music copyright issues. Once the deal clears, it's just a wait and see game.

Good. I'm sure looking forward to see some improvements on Twitch.

Then that must mean that Google is buying Amazon.

@kamuz: I've heard the actual reason wasn't so much the potential copyright liability as it was a breakdown about what would happen if the FTC nixed the deal.

Whenever a corporate merger like this happens, the FTC has to approve it before it actually goes through. The bigger the deal, the bigger the scrutiny. Since Google would have ended up owning both YouTube and Twitch, there is a possibility the FTC would have denied approval for the purchase based on Google having an effective monopoly over online streaming.

The rumor going around is that Google and Twitch wanted to put in a "breakdown fee" that would be paid if the FTC didn't approve the deal. However, it sounds like the two sides either couldn't agree on either an amount, or who the risk of FTC denial should fall on (should Google pay Twitch or Twitch pay Google?) and so the negotiations broke down, allowing Amazon to swoop in and make the purchase instead.

@president_barackbar: New streaming and VOD policies are already coming.

@bradtgrace: If they have software that identifies and blocks content based on the audio played in it being copywritten, I don't see why your idea for "buy this game" and "buy this music" wouldn't be a possibility.

I thought it was already confirmed that Google bought them??

People will say Amazon based off the uneasy feeling that Google is getting too big. Then they will rationalize it accordingly.

Google was in talks to buy Twitch, then the internet found out and got all internet on us.

Well, lesser of two evils and all that. Still don't see Twitch lasting very long as a site people rely on if they keep those audio modding rules and the like

Stick by your guns and do/don't use their site if you feel strongly about policy changes and such. Don't pansy out and say something like, "It sucks but of course it plays out like this."

Interesting..

Well Amazon have been making a lot of moves these days with buying stuff like Comixology and Double Helix.

I'd prefer it be run by neither, but Twitch is being very problematic itself these days with the horrible censoring and silencing of archived streams.

At least Google didn't buy them out, because Google has pretty much made YouTube a very problematic place, trying to interject their own Google+ failure into that project was a big mistake that does nothing but infuriate people.

I repeat what I usually say in these situations: Could be worse - They could've been bought by EA...

Any software engineer out there that has ever had to deal with Amazon AWS ... would know that Amazon cannot code front-end's to save their life..

if you think the UX/UI of Twitch will get better, you're dead wrong.

I don't really know much about Amazon, other than the fact that i've always had good service, and I like free shipping.

Will Amazon make twitch worse? Well twitch does a pretty good job ruining itself without the help of a mega corporation, as we saw with the way they are gutting their service recently.

Twitch has always been popular on account of "well, at least it's not Ustream", So the viewing audience, and smaller streamers have little brand loyalty. Twitch has given few indications that they even care about these people except as commodities, so that probably won't change unless Amazon opens up the partner program to every user.

The lesson of the last year is however, that music licensing houses are the scum of the internet. Every time someone's audio gets muted, its some stupid license holding corporation. I'd be a lot more sympathetic if it was the game's publisher, or the artist who made the music.

Amazon are pretty good at servers, cloud computing and storage.

Really hope this means their crappy android based console will support streaming to twitch out of the box. The barrier to entry when it comes to streaming shitty phone games live on the internet is much too high right now.

@bradtgrace: Good point i bet they'll handle it better than google

Who gives a shit what corporate overlord Twitch goes too?

Interesting. I never thought Amazon would be interested in expanding into that territory but, as others have said, it is a LOT better than Google...

Maybe Amazon can teach Mr. Twitch CEO how to properly run a company.

Why is everyone calling this a rumor? Scoops linked the letter from the CEO of twitch. Pretty hard evidence if you ask me.

tl;dr: Amazon is actually a much better fit than Google was.

Amazon's declared objective is to build and develop platforms and decrease their dependence on their direct retailing business, and they are actually a leader in terms of hosting & content delivery infrastructure. (AWS / Amazon Web Services)

Its an ideal fit from the technology side: Twitch was always bursting at its seams infrastructure-wise and will certainly benefit from having a partner specialized in this sector.

Amazon can increase Twitch' margins overnight by using resources they already own and maintain anyway, not to mention that they essentially have really in-depth know-how related to scaling up basically any generic web service.

From a business perspective, this essentially makes Twitch more valuable to them than it would be for most other tech companies.

Google meanwhile obviously do know their stuff and tackled a similar challenge when they absorbed Youtube, but they mostly had the luxury of scaling their own, really specific, really esoteric services with their own, really custom-tailored server infrastructure.

They are not a hosting company, and they have no great track record of taking foreign-developed platforms and migrating them on their ecosystem. (however they are really good at making services die a slow, agonizing death and then redevelop them from scratch with the talent they acquired!)

From the monetization perspective, the upside of partnering with Amazon is more ambiguous, but still interesting: Google can make some extra money out of Twitch right away by just absorbing it into their ad inventory, especially because Twitch is currently pretty terrible with regards to ad serving.

Also, Google really knows this space well and know how to get their inventory sold no matter what at the highest achievable CPM.

But ultimately, the upside for Google isn't actually that great: with the way things are going in video advertising, Twitch might just have switched to Google's ad network by itself at some point (actually: chances are they already sold part of their inventory through Google anonymously), which is basically free money at no risk for Google. And even if they wouldn't have, they just don't *need* anything that's there.

Amazon however recently announced that they want to become independent with regards to ad serving on their own platforms (which, right now, is based on Doubleclick = Google) and develop their own ad serving network, which is a huge deal (Microsoft couldn't do it right, while a husk of a company like Yahoo can survive because they did it early). Given that video advertising is the fastest-growing segment within online advertising, that might just drive Amazon to secure a bunch of inventory in an easy-to-market niche?