Twitch, Amazon announced .Amazon is buying Twitch for $970 million in cash, but it’s yet to go through government approval. Amazon head Jeff Bezos is pretty excited about the deal and, apparently, about gaming:
“Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon and Twitch has built a platform that brings together tens of millions of people who watch billions of minutes of games each month – from The International, to breaking the world record for Mario, to gaming conferences like E3. And, amazingly, Twitch is only three years old.”
This purchase isn’t a surprise however the rumors hadn’t mentioned Amazon was even interested in buying the company. Rumors had swirled that Google, the owners of YouTube, had purchased the company for $1 billion. Amazon isn’t stepping into a new market they already have put their toes in the water with Amazon Game Studios and recently purchasing game studio Double Helix. Amazon also released a gaming controller for its Fire TV, and we could soon see Twitch integration into the Fire TV.
Twitch is the king of game streaming, beating out the likes of YouTube and Ustream. The service is built into both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, though it originally gained popularity with the PC gaming crowd. The service has become the go to place to stream gaming conferences and events.
Amazon could help the service expand and continue to support the large amount of data the company uses to streaming all this video using AWS. Amazon also has a track record for integrating some of their services into new purchases but keeping the brands intact without little intervention. It sounds like Amazon will fund the companies future plans and bank off of anything Twitch does but the company will largely stay independent.
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