This Old Neon Forum

There have been rumours and speculation for the past couple of weeks about Google buying Twitch, but now it looks like that's not going to happen, as it seems to be confirmed that Amazon will be buying them instead, sometime in 2014.

Admittedly, Twitch isn't of that much interest to me, but it is one of the default streaming services for the PS4, so it's what I use.

Well, that's a swerve. I've been kind of following this story because two shows I watch regularly stream on Twitch and one gets a considerable amount of money from it. I'm not sure if Amazon will be a much better owner than Google, but at least there's no chance for Twitch to just be subsumed into YouTube now. It's nice to have a streaming service dedicated to gaming.

Rob

Pluvius wrote:Well, that's a swerve. I've been kind of following this story because two shows I watch regularly stream on Twitch and one gets a considerable amount of money from it. I'm not sure if Amazon will be a much better owner than Google, but at least there's no chance for Twitch to just be subsumed into YouTube now. It's nice to have a streaming service dedicated to gaming.

The transformation into "YouTube Streaming" was something I had wondered & (mildly) worried about too. YouTube could be a handy resource for saving & sharing highlights, though.

What's interesting is that a bunch of the changes people started to get up in arms about, Twitch said they were going to make those changes anyway (ostensibly to protect their members), but users blamed Google. Most of that kind of policy change (e.g. using content bots to mute licensed music, not storing highlights permanently, etc.) can easily be undertaken by Amazon, too. Overall, I imagine Twitch will change less under Amazon.

Twitch becoming part of Amazon could potentially open up some new business models for Twitch users, something which I doubt would have happened with Google(but Google+ synchronization and other annoying fluff would have been likely). Also, I see various types of promotional advertisements run during special streamed events(like for example I bought my fight stick during a special deal during a tournament), you could see more stuff like that where Amazon runs special deals.

Here's a New York Times article announcing the deal. The interesting bit of this article for me was the fact that Twitch viewership rivals top cable networks during prime time. Yikes!

Kong Wen wrote:Here's a New York Times article announcing the deal. The interesting bit of this article for me was the fact that Twitch viewership rivals top cable networks during prime time. Yikes!

Those are actually really interesting numbers. I'm curious in how the difference in revenue looks, considering that Twitch does actually not produce any content. They do pay part of the revenue to the actual streamers though, and the costs for hosting looks different than a network channel.

MTV is valued at $5.6 B according to Forbes, yet has fewer viewers. But I suppose that prime time number doesn't take the MTV channels in other countries into account.

Twitch seems to have a greater potential for growth than MTV though.. The $1B price tag doesn't seem that crazy to me.

I think those numbers are precisely why we're seeing purchase bids now, rather than later. If those viewership numbers are accurate, then $1B is probably actually undervalued. We're at a real crux where broadcasting is truly being usurped by streaming services, and savvy businesses/investors are all over it. It's hardly getting in on the ground floor, but with user numbers like that, I'll bet you Google and Amazon both are predicting enormous expansion in the fairly short-term. If Google didn't already have YouTube, we'd have probably been in for quite the bidding war.

MTV may be valued over $5B today, but I'll bet those numbers will steadily drop, inverse with the big streaming sites' gains.

Mind, you'd probably get sounder financial opinions from a soft-boiled egg...

VictorViper wrote:I think those numbers are precisely why we're seeing purchase bids now, rather than later. If those viewership numbers are accurate, then $1B is probably actually undervalued. We're at a real crux where broadcasting is truly being usurped by streaming services, and savvy businesses/investors are all over it. It's hardly getting in on the ground floor, but with user numbers like that, I'll bet you Google and Amazon both are predicting enormous expansion in the fairly short-term.

Not only that, but any of those big companies knows they can monetize the fuck out of Twitch.

Kong Wen wrote:

VictorViper wrote:I think those numbers are precisely why we're seeing purchase bids now, rather than later. If those viewership numbers are accurate, then $1B is probably actually undervalued. We're at a real crux where broadcasting is truly being usurped by streaming services, and savvy businesses/investors are all over it. It's hardly getting in on the ground floor, but with user numbers like that, I'll bet you Google and Amazon both are predicting enormous expansion in the fairly short-term.

Not only that, but any of those big companies knows they can monetize the fuck out of Twitch.

Except Rogers Communications... those guy already went on overload with that NHL deal!