Amazon to buy videogame platform Twitch for $970 mn
Tuesday, 26 August 2014
US online retail giant Amazon has bolstered its Internet video presence, whistling past Google to snatch up Twitch and its huge audience for live-streamed gaming. The acquisition, announced Monday, is one of the largest in Amazon 's history: $970 million in cash for the three-year-old Internet company. The costliest takeover by Jeff Bezos's group was online shoe store Zappos, valued at $1.2 billion in 2009 but partly in shares. ‘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,’ said Jeff Bezos, Amazon 's founder and chief executive. The San Francisco-based Twitch Interactive streams games being played for non-playing viewers to watch, and hosts gaming events. It allows viewers to chat with the players and others, lending it some of the qualities of social networking websites, and it sells advertising to generate income. The company claims more than 55 million visitors a month to its website, via desktop computers, tablets and smartphones, and more than one million ‘broadcasters,’ gamers who stream video of their games over the Internet via Twitch, according to AFP.