Age of the Geek

Amazon Gets A Twitch

     If there was any doubt left that video game streaming is sticking around as a mainstream method of entertainment, Jeff Bezos just eradicated it with Amazon.com's $970 million purchase of Twitch.tv.

     Twitch.tv is, as I've mentioned before, a website where people can watch other people play video games. What started as a novelty for hardcore gamers has become an entertainment juggernaut with a viewerbase that draws more people than MTV during peak hours.

     Last month, more than 55 million unique viewers visited the website to watch everything from professional gaming competitions to fish playing Pokemon.

     Yes. Some ingenious soul set up a system that allows a fish to control a video game. And more than four million people have stopped by to watch it.

     This is the world we live in.

     I don't spend a whole lot of time on Twitch myself. When I game I usually have Netflix or YouTube running at the same time, and I can't imagine watching me play a video game I'm only half paying attention to being very entertaining.

     But every so often I'll pop in on a random channel just to say "hi" to the stranger playing the game. The trick behind Twitch's success is that it's not really about watching the game, it's about interacting with the community.

     Amazon's purchase of Twitch came as a big surprise, largely because everybody thought Google had already done so weeks ago. Whispers of Google's acquisition of Twitch started back in May and it was apparently close to a done deal. Enough so that Twitch implemented copyright content filtering very similar to what you see on YouTube, which is another video service that Google owns.

     A marriage between Twitch and YouTube seems like a perfect match, but apparently it was too perfect. It's suspected that Google owning both Twitch.tv and YouTube would put them dangerously close to monopoly territory, and an agreement couldn't be made between Google and Twitch about who would pay the break-up costs if anti-trust laws forced them apart.

     So in swooped Amazon. They put Twitch.tv in their shopping cart and hit "buy now." Nearly a billion dollars later, Amazon owns the fourth largest bandwidth consumer on the Internet.

     So now that Amazon has it, what are they going to do with it?

     As far as corporate synergy goes, Twitch is probably the most effective way out there to advertise video games. Forget commercials. Twitch lets potential customers watch the game, in action. They can see for themselves exactly how much fun people are having with the latest new title. Assuming the game is good enough to sell itself, Twitch is the platform to promote it.

     Right now, as I type this in the middle of the night, there are more than 50,000 people watching other people play "League of Legends." Imagine if every single viewer watching those streams were looking at scrolling advertisements for "League of Legends" merchandise that they could buy off of Amazon.com.

     That's some valuable advertising, but is it worth a billion dollars?

     Amazon has made other moves towards the video game market. They've opened their own development studio and released the "gaming system that isn't a gaming system" that is the Amazon Fire TV.

     However, while Amazon's interest in the gaming community is evident, it so far appears to be a one way road. The audience of gamers that Twitch attracts don't play the games that can be found on the Fire TV.

     That may change in the future, but for now it seems that that Amazon doesn't have any plans for Twitch beyond them continuing to do what they're doing.

     Who knows. Maybe they bought it just because Google wanted it.

     As for Google themselves, one wonders if this won't inspire them to focus on improving their capability for live streaming through YouTube. The infrastructure is all there, it just needs to be assembled. Buying Twitch would have gotten them the branding and the built in audience, but there's nothing stopping YouTube from doing it on their own.

     Other competitors are beginning to pop up as well. Some notable personalities have already dropped Twitch.tv in favor of newcomer Hitbox.tv, citing a better cut of advertising revenue. Twitch may have been the pioneer of live stream gaming, but it's possible the market is now large enough to support multiple stream providers.

     It'll be interesting to see where things go from here.

     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and spent a half-hour watching somebody play "Sonic Adventure 2" while researching for this column.