By Amanda
Twitch CEO Emmett Shear announced today that Amazon has purchased the gaming website. The deal will occur later in the year for approximately $970 million. Twitch attracts more viewers during primetime than Hulu and Amazon Prime, even more than some traditional television networks! Forbes speculates that Amazon will use Twitch to bolster its growth in the multimedia community (which has been viewed negatively by artists and other writers, but that’s an issue for another time).
Shear’s message was positive: “Today, I’m pleased to announce we’ve been acquired by Amazon. We chose Amazon because they believe in our community, they share our values and long-term vision, and they want to help us get there faster. We’re keeping most everything the same: our office, our employees, our brand, and most importantly our independence. But with Amazon’s support we’ll have the resources to bring you an even better Twitch.” We’ll see if the leadership continues to remain the same after the initial transition, but this announcement gives me, at least, hope that Twitch and all of its memes, experiments, and democratization will remain the same.
In my opinion, Amazon buying Twitch allows for further competition and creativity that would have been stifled if Google had bought the streaming network. YouTube and Twitch are two different communities with styles and functionality unique to each. If the Google-Twitch deal had been struck, one would have had to absorb another to its detriment—mostly Twitch, as I think its chat function is far superior, but it also seriously needs help in the mobile app department.
Will Amazon cause the same issues for Twitch that it has for other creative content producers? I don’t know. Writers and artists are working with new material, whereas Twitch streamers play copyrighted material. The increasingly aggressive content ID on YouTube doesn’t seem to fit with Amazon’s model of grow, grow, grow. Simply, the same issues don’t exist, and the Amazon behemoth may actually prove to be a blessing. Unless Amazon moves Twitch subscriptions to monthly unlimited or tiered plans, like the ones from Netflix or their own Kindle bundles, gamers who make their living from Twitch won’t see much of a difference.
Shear’s message was positive: “Today, I’m pleased to announce we’ve been acquired by Amazon. We chose Amazon because they believe in our community, they share our values and long-term vision, and they want to help us get there faster. We’re keeping most everything the same: our office, our employees, our brand, and most importantly our independence. But with Amazon’s support we’ll have the resources to bring you an even better Twitch.” We’ll see if the leadership continues to remain the same after the initial transition, but this announcement gives me, at least, hope that Twitch and all of its memes, experiments, and democratization will remain the same.
In my opinion, Amazon buying Twitch allows for further competition and creativity that would have been stifled if Google had bought the streaming network. YouTube and Twitch are two different communities with styles and functionality unique to each. If the Google-Twitch deal had been struck, one would have had to absorb another to its detriment—mostly Twitch, as I think its chat function is far superior, but it also seriously needs help in the mobile app department.
Will Amazon cause the same issues for Twitch that it has for other creative content producers? I don’t know. Writers and artists are working with new material, whereas Twitch streamers play copyrighted material. The increasingly aggressive content ID on YouTube doesn’t seem to fit with Amazon’s model of grow, grow, grow. Simply, the same issues don’t exist, and the Amazon behemoth may actually prove to be a blessing. Unless Amazon moves Twitch subscriptions to monthly unlimited or tiered plans, like the ones from Netflix or their own Kindle bundles, gamers who make their living from Twitch won’t see much of a difference.