Amazon to buy Twitch for almost a billion

After seeing Google back out of a deal for the online video streaming service, Amazon will be scooping them up and adding to their already impressive media empire.

Once upon a time, Amazon.com was a store on the web where you could get books and assorted other items. Now it’s a massive near-monopoly that sells just about everything under the sun, undercuts nearly all competition, and has launched a cell phone, tablets (and readers), bought a comic book publishing platform, and now is going to be the proud owner of Twitch. The amount for the buy? A measly $970 million USD.

Perhaps the biggest and best known of the online streaming services when it comes to games, Twitch is available on all major current generation gaming platforms and has rocketed to the top of the popularity charts. The site boasted some 55 million unique users in the month of July, which saw those viewers watching 15 billion minutes of video, which is one heck of a lot of game time. There’s also about a million users broadcasting on the service, no small figure either.

What exactly the acquisition means for the industry that uses it most (gaming), remains to be seen. Amazon hasn’t futzed too much with online digital comic book shop comiXology though, aside from the move to change how purchases are made on it, so that’s somewhat comforting. The deal is thought to be heading towards finalization in the next few months, so I guess we’ll see then what may or may not be happening to your favorite Twitch-enbled devices.

Source: MCV