Confirmed: Amazon Has Purchased Twitch

I'm tired of every internet startup existing solely to be bought by one of the half dozen big fish that control the internet. However, as an avid fan of Amazon (I have probably spent $35,000 to $40,000 on Amazon in the last 13 years), I think this is a far better path than being bought by Google.

For one thing, Amazon has a history of knocking bothersome business models around. The middlemen in publshing for far too long have unnecessarily caused a huge increase over what a book should cost. Same with music and other forms of entertainment and information. Amazon has not backed down from pushing back against these places. I won't count on it, but I could envision Amazon pushing back against Nintendo trying to squash streams or recordings for copyright purposes and actually defending fair use.

Unfortunately, there also just isn't much on twitch.tv I give a shit about. I just want to watch people play games. Most twitch content is people being fucking obnoxious while playing them. I don't need to year you act like a mental case while you drool for attention. Just shut up and play your game, until you have something worth saying.

Hmmm. It'd give me a good excuse to get Prime, then I could justify buying all my stuff on Amazon and getting free shipping.

@lukeweizer: But what if you had to subscribe to Amazon Prime instead?

Oh man. I can't wait to get my Gauss gun.

I work in the software industry, and a number of my colleagues have also had less-than-kind things to say about the software development side of Amazon. It's basically a burnout factory. They grind their coders and testers to the bone with long hours and demanding workloads. Most of the people that I know that had gotten jobs at Amazon have since moved on from the company.

@larmer said:

Yup - Twitch is earning some income now (not sure if they've started turning a net profit yet) whereas Oculus hasn't actually proven itself financially. The former was a relatively a safe bet, the latter was a rather risky one.

can't wait for our three or four megacorp future where all innovation and entrepreneurship has been squelched. oh well, at least Syndicate may come true.

Interesting that Twitch got like twice as much money for their acquisition than Oculus did.

I still haven't figured out if this is good or bad news. Better than Google buying them, at any rate.

wow. nice move amazon...

@corvak: As a retailer, they have bullied and attempted to bully many publishing houses, the Big Five included, into various (non-profitable for the authors involved) programs by such tactics as: removing buy buttons, disabling search meta-tags for specific items, creating abnormally long shipping times, etc. Amazon has also tried to bully publishing houses, the ones who have 'opted in' on their pricing.

Not to mention the working conditions that many of their employees out at the distro centers have to deal with; most inhumaine and some actively dangerous.

I'm a little pressed for time right now to go through and cite my sources, but a quick google search will point towards Amazon's sour dealings with practically everyone involved with their corporation, save the stockholders.

Aside from a somewhat mediocre cloud service, what is so bad about Amazon's practices?

Keep in mind, the only direct contact I have with them is as a retailer.

Guys...Amazon and their practices...Jeez! No, this isn't good!!

I am slightly more okay with Amazon buying Twitch than Google. I feel like Google wouldn't want to play nice with all the Xbox One integration Twitch has.

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?

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

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

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...

Who gives a shit what corporate overlord Twitch goes too?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Interesting..

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."

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

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

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

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

@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.

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

@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.

Then that must mean that Google is buying Amazon.

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

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.

I cant even imagine what $970 million dollars looks like

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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