The official announcement came that Amazon has bought Twitch for $970 million to be paid in cash. Twitch is a video streaming platform particularly targeted to video games with the broadcast of games played by users. Twitch offers both live and on-demand streaming. This news comes after months of rumors of possible acquisitions, especially by Google.

Twitch was created in 2011, initially under the name Twitch.tv, as a Justin.tv spin-off. The company’s site was divided into several categories of contents but the category dedicated to video games grew very quickly so the company decided to devote resources separate from the other categories.

During these three years, Twitch has grown tremendously, also thanks to the contribution of new investors. In July, there were 55 million unique visitors for a total of 15 billion minutes of contents. Over a million people sent their contributions: individual players, professionals, publishers, developers and other organizations connected to video games.

Among video games fans, watching games is like watching a game of a classic sport on TV. Twitch showed that it’s a global phenomenon and enthusiasts found the ideal platform to follow games online. It’s for this reason that in recent months there were rumors of a strong interest from Google, which wanted to integrate Twitch with YouTube, but also from Yahoo, which wants to enter very strongly the field of online video.

For a while, it seemed that Google would buy Twitch but in the end surprigly Amazon did it instead. The company’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos (photo ©Steve Jurvetson) and Twitch CEO Emmett Shear released the classic statements of satisfaction that follow an acquisition.

Amazon has been developing its Instant Video service for a number of years showing it want to compete in the field of video streaming. It’s clear that Jeff Bezos wants to expand this type of activity, which with Twitch will also become social. In short, it’s potentially a big deal!

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