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Comment by imjk | Hacker News Reader

I think this makes sense for Amazon for two reasons: 1) One of the barriers to entry of live-streaming sites is the expensive hosting costs. With AWS infrastructure, Amazon could potentially have another competitive advantage over other live-streaming sites. They may even provide a better service through higher resolution streaming as they wouldn't be as constrained with bandwidth costs.

2) As Amazon enters the online advertising space to compete with Google Adwords and Adsense, they'll want to own web properties with high impressions for their display ads. User based video creation is great for that but comes with risk for copyright violations. Twitch solves both these issues as it'll give display ads high impressions without much concern about copyright violations as these will mostly be legit user-originated content.

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It is also good for the market to have two larger game channels (youtube and twitch, yes there are Everyplay, hitbox and there will be more now this deal happened).

Amazon is really hands-off with acquisitions for the most part such as Zappos and Audible. They primarily add to the offerings by cheaper fulfillment or server/bandwidth/cpu costs and more. I think they will treat twitch better than if it was just integrated into youtube.

Also, it shows a dedication to game developers and supporting marketing of games on their platforms and others. Amazon buying them is actually better for Twitch and the gaming/let's play type new marketing channels.

A streamer also mentioned that recently Twitch send out an enquiry to partners about what kind of affiliation programs they would be interested in. My bet would be that Amazons angle is going to be integration of their storefront and other services into Twitch in the form of affiliate programs ("Buy this game now"-buttons, adding Twitch Turbo to Amazon Prime and the likes).

I wouldn't even be surprised if down the road they'd announce a Steam-like digital distribution thingymagick. Steam and it's competitors are rolling in cash and have been getting quite some flack recently so now might be the best time.

Amazon already does digital distribution for video games and probably some other PC software, in addition to their significantly more high profile Android offering.

And while their storefront is adequate, their delivery and update systems are abysmal. Steam hasn't won mindshare because it JUST made it easy to buy games online, but it also made it easy to sign into an account, click a button and play them anywhere, and keeps your software up-to-date in the background.

EA has the only competitor that comes close, but their tarnished reputation in the gaming community has sullied the only worthwhile adversary Steam has.

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