#$970

$970/room in a shared space

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Amazon to Buy Video Game Live-Streaming Site Twitch for $970 Million

Amazon has agreed to acquire video game reside-streaming internet site Twitch for $ 970 million, the businesses announced Monday.

Twitch has turn into a common on-line destination for video game players, who use the web site to stream live gameplay of titles across a assortment of consoles and formats. More than 55 million unique visitors viewed content material generated by far more than 1 million broadcasters on the internet site in July 2014.

It had been extensively reported that Google was in talks to buy Twitch for about $ 1 billion, until Amazon’s surprise announcement. “We chose Amazon simply because they think in our community, they share our values and long-term vision, and they want to support us get there more quickly,” stated Twitch CEO Emmett Shear in a statement. Twitch will continue to operate as an independent brand from Amazon, he stated.

The acquisition is the latest sign that Amazon is severe about becoming a massive player in the worlds of both gaming and on the internet video. The retail giant snapped up the video game developer Double Helix Games earlier this year, and the company’s new set-prime box, the Amazon Fire Television, boasts a bevy of Android-primarily based games and a classic video game controller as a primary promoting point.

“Like Twitch, we obsess over consumers and like to feel differently, and we appear forward to learning from them and assisting them move even more quickly to build new services for the gaming community,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos mentioned in a statement.

Much more important than gaming although will be the foothold Twitch grants Amazon in the world of online video. As a quickly growing video internet site that has generated much more web site visitors than Facebook and Hulu in past months, Twitch will give Amazon greater scale to compete for ad dollars with the Google-owned YouTube, the world’s most significant on-line video destination by far. Amazon has currently been experimenting with pre-roll advertisements for episodes of some of its original shows. Now the firm will have access to millions of further video watchers among the ages of 18 to 34, a hugely coveted demographic on Madison Avenue. “This is genuinely interesting addition and a way to bring Amazon’s brand to that community in a way that they genuinely haven’t been in a position to ahead of,” says Brian Blau, analysis director at Gartner.

For Twitch, the buy is proof that courting a niche demographic can pay off. Twitch began in 2011 as an offshoot of Justin.tv, a more broadly focused live-streaming platform. Shear and his colleagues realized that individuals had been using Justin.tv to livestream gameplay of hits like StarCraft two. “Watching and sharing in that expertise is as considerably a portion of video games as playing is,” Shear told TIME earlier this year. He was verified right—Twitch is now one of the greatest websites on the Web and Justin.television shut down earlier this month.

But Twitch’s ambitions probably extend beyond gaming. This summer time the business began experimenting with live streams of music concerts. Amazon’s long-term aim, Blau says, could be to develop Twitch into a “live version of YouTube.” Such an evolution, even though, would need get-in from Twitch’s fickle user base of passionate gamers.