Amazon buys live video startup Twitch for $970 mn

Online retailer Amazon will pay more than $1 billion US for Twitch Interactive, Inc., a streaming website where users watch other people play video games, the companies announced on Monday.

The deal is Amazon's second biggest, and underscores the popularity of online gaming. Though little-known outside of tech and gaming, Twitch, founded in 2011, is the fourth-largest source of U.S. Internet traffic, behind only Netflix, Google and Apple, according to network researcher DeepField Inc.

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon gave a quote about the deal, saying “Like Twitch, we obsess over customers and like to think differently, and we look forward to learning from them and helping them move even faster to build new services for the gaming community.”

The acquisition gives the Web retailer an online forum of more than 55 million monthly active users, where people discuss games or watch others as they play. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive officer, has made video games a focus of a strategy to add more entertainment services. The company operates a game studio in Seattle and has been luring software developers to build more video-game titles for its Fire TV set-top box, Fire Phone and Kindle Fire tablets.

“Amazon and Twitch optimize for our customers first and are both believers in the future of gaming,” said Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. “Being part of Amazon will let us do even more for our community. We will be able to create tools and services faster than we could have independently. This change will mean great things for our community, and will let us bring Twitch to even more people around the world.”

Shear added on the Twitch Blog, "We chose Amazon because they believe in our community, they share our values and long-term vision, and they want to help us get there faster. We’re keeping most everything the same: our office, our employees, our brand, and most importantly our independence. But with Amazon’s support we’ll have the resources to bring you an even better Twitch."

Earlier this summer, Google was reportedly nearing a $1 billion deal to buy Twitch. Google, which owns YouTube, would have been able to turn YouTube into an even bigger video behemoth if it also hosted video game streaming, but Amazon swooped in.