f13.net

Source. (http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/youtube-to-acquire-videogame-streaming-service-twitch-for-1-billion-sources-1201185204/)

:psyduck:

I mean, does Twitch actually make money? I mean as in come in net positive overall?

Wow.

All that console integration?

Google paying what they did for YouTube was pretty questionable as well. My guess is, like YouTube this is more about some form of underlying technology. Plus, another place to track user info and add Google+ ... oh wait they took G+ out back and shot it like the dog it is didn't they?

I think they see the ad revenue that would come with an increasing audience watching other people play video games and consider it a worthy investment. I would much rather watch a compelling game experience for casual entertainment than anything on television.

Actually no they didn't; they've just been forcefully integrating G+ into literally all their platforms. You have no choice but to effectively have a G+ account if you want to do anything with an account on youtube now.

I read a couple articles saying they are basically dumping the "G+ or Bust" philosophy very recently.

They should dump G+. It's garbage.

I guess I'm just happy it isn't Facebook that's buying Twitch which shows how low expectations I have for deals like this nowadays.  :oh_i_see:

I wonder if that means they'll be bringing Youtube's super aggressive copyright infringement policy to Twitch. I'd hate to have to stop streaming because I'm not allowed to play background music.

I wish I'd work at The Onion. I am having this idea for a "Facebook buys your Girlfriend!" headline...

Is it at all possible that they are also buying out a competitor?  They can integrate it into Youtube in sort of the same way that Vimeo is, and drive all that traffic back to Youtube itself.

That's what it seems like to me; at the very least they can use YT to host archived videos and suggest related Youtube videos on any given twitch stream.

I am completely fine with this purchase.

Hadn't thought about that, that's going to be a big deal for some people.  Almost all of the top channels use copyrighted music, even the big name tournament casts do it to fill downtime between rounds / maps / whatever.

I'm not sure if their algorithms will be able to detect it while streaming (since I know fuckall about how that works) but it'll kill archived broadcasts; if they start deleting accounts it'll piss off a ton of people.

I'm shocked that's lasted as long as it has. I'm pretty sure they, or at least their close relative justin.tv, put quite a bit of effort into weeding out illicit TV/movie rebroadcasts. I don't understand why the RIAA isn't all over them.

Got no problem with this, looking forward to a proper YT gaming sub-section. Assimilation! :cthulu:

gonna own when some popular streamer gets his account automatically deleted during a broadcast because his phone went off in the background and played copyrighted music

Can't wait to be forced to merge my Twitch account to my YouTube account which is merged to my G+ account that was originally a gmail account. Editing my user settings isn't enough of a pain in the ass already.

Monopoly here we come.

They've mashed a ton of my accounts together with mergers and G+, it's really aggravating.

I have a bunch of people that want to do a group painting session regularly using G+ BUT I FUCKING CAN'T because my accounts are all knotted up between my professional and 2 personal (family and friends) accounts.

So fuck G+ bloody.

I can't wait for something or someone to come down hard on Google. I remember when they actually lived by the whole "do no evil" bit. Now they are just Microsoft 2.0, I'm having a real hard time thinking of a single thing they had done in the past few years to gmail or yotube that wasn't just a massive pain in the ass.

Spoke with a Twitch employee today briefly on muni and he said they are hoping that they are going to continue to operate independently but that nobody at the lower levels knows dick yet.

What is Google doing, precisely, that qualifies as evil?

They basically lobby as hard as anyone now while trying desperately to not let any word get out on where they are giving out slush-dollars. Everything they have done since they decided to try to out Facebook Facebook has been evil (fine not literally evil) in terms of annoying the motherfucking shit out of me.

I had this exact discussion with a google employee. He was all "we aren't evil, we're just doing what any corporation would do" and that made me feel like he didn't get it. Google used to make shit that just worked the best they could make it work. Now it works the best for them, or G+, or advertisers or whatever the fuck the motive is but its clear that most of these "features" were not user requested.

This is going to be a disaster for Twitch.

More and more are youtubers getting DMCA takedown notices because someone is giving a legit review of a game.  Furthermore, people on twitch usually at least have background music that will get caught by the automatic copyright algorithms.

I don't understand, I ignore Google+ and all their other shit works fine for me. I don't log into Youtube, and I don't know why anybody would. Furthermore, I don't see them rolling Twitch into Youtube, but I certainly see them integrating some tech into Youtube.

Anyway, yea, I'm just not seeing this as a bitch fest.

I've managed to keep my YT account without signing up for G+, but it's been a struggle. However, I have had numerous videos deleted and gotten warnings for music; if they apply the same policy to Twitch I'll either stop streaming or just stream without audio entirely.

I should just send an offer to Google to buy me out.  It's inevitable.. Google is the new Skynet.

I would assume sometime in the future we're going to see a huge amount of archived Twitch videos removed due to DMCA take downs as well as much tighter rules on what you can stream and what music you can stream while you do it.  I fail to see any upside to this for end users.

They literally purchased that evil company that was creating those horrific killer robot videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww).

Maybe they'll stop using shitty music to overlay something I want to watch?

fuckin' A-MEN. Them and their shitty music applied to [insert ANY game streamed on Twitch, really :P] that probably makes them feel so cool.

Alternatively, we'll just stop streaming; I like listening to music while playing.

That's fine. Just don't mix it into your stream.

DMCA takedowns are not really Google's fault in any case.

Some people actually create content rather than just bitch about what others do  :why_so_serious:

Upsides:
More resources to support/upgrade twitches straining infrastructure.

Downsides
G+ integration.
Aggressive copyright enforcement.
Google's tendency to discontinue/downgrade products that they can't advertise with.

Anything else?
I wonder about this from content producers perspective. Are Youtube's or twitch's deals generally more favorable?

Nothing is really lost with fewer people streaming games. Especially if it's self-inflicted over music.

I started to log in when I figured out I could push a video to the DVR or Roku straight from my Chromebook or tablet. Even with a small tablet, it's easier to type a search than it is with a remote control. Particularly as my partner and I are prone to Lum-esque nostalgia fests for 80s videos when we've had a few martinis--making the remote typing that much less coordinated.

And yeah, this is going to kill Twitch.

Actually, about one billion of our earth dollars are lost if people stop streaming games on Twitch, for any reason.  We're not talking about, like, one or two channels which are going to be pissed off, literally 90 to 95% of them do this to some degree.

That's if Google actually wants Twitch, if they are just trying to kill off a competitor than Twitch dying is good thing.

That will never happen. People streaming games are attention whores.

The question isn't "will they keep streaming" it's "will they keep streaming on Twitch."  I've already seen some people leaving Youtube after the "integrating comments with G+" bullshit went down, I'm not convinced that people will stick around on Twitch when years worth of their archives are napalmed for playing Darude - Sandstorm.  Most of the big channels have revenue streams that depend on streaming, if you start pushing them away they're going to find somewhere that's easier for them to do business with.  And most of the smaller streams are just a guy with one or two of his buddies hanging out with him or something.  It won't take a lot to make them decide "this isn't worth it".

They'll keep streaming, and most will keep streaming on twitch.  Then they can be martyrs for the cause, and even more deserving of attention.

Most of the streams I watch is for the gameplay, usually with entertaining commentary.  Only of the few channels I subscribe to play music because I find it detracts from the main point of the stream.  Obviously people have different tastes, but those people are wrong (watch your step, chasm is steep).

Pretty much. The sky is falling shit over not having music is pretty silly. Even if they go elsewhere, what's to stop the DMCA train following them to the next station?

If I'm watching the game, I want to hear the game.

Most channels would sound better if they switched to unlicensed artists anyway.

Trying not to sound hipsterish, but there it is.

I need Linkin Park to accompany Naruto duels, thanks.

Current pop songs always match any gameplay.  Or death metal if you wear black tee shirts.

Death metal goes with anything.  :why_so_serious:

It's not just music.

Game developer (including Nintendo) have either taken down people's reviews for games over the idea that the game itself is copyrighted, or they have claimed ownership which caused Youtube to give ad revenue to the publisher instead of the reviewer until the reviewer fights it, in which case he'll never get back the revenue taken from him.

Incidentally; Nintendo has announced it wants to open a partnership to share ad revenue with Let's Players and other people who post video of Nintendo products on Youtube.

Lmao. Just gonna say it: Nintendo shouldn't have a right to ask for ad revenue from recorded game footage nor should they be able to DMCA game footage. It is not the same as uploading a movie as it is not the proper "content" of the game IMO. This is slippery slope shit which could potentially lead to publishers/devs DMCAing bad reviews out of existence for using non promo-kit game footage or images. If you can claim youtubers playing your game are violating your IP rights, you can do the same to anyone reviewing it.

Update on this in case anyone's not following, turns out it's Amazon that bought Twitch. (http://blog.twitch.tv/2014/08/a-letter-from-the-ceo-august-25-2014/)  This is shortly after they implemented a big system wide content ID system (http://blog.twitch.tv/2014/08/3136/) on their VOD service, though it doesn't impact their live broadcasts.

Amazon's Fire OS for their Kindle tablets, despite being based on Android, doesn't use the Google apps, including youtube. Wonder if they're looking to build a competitor.

yeah I saw analysis a few days ago that Amazon was gearing up for a big assault on Google's core advertising business. That's where the real money is on the internet, big fat margins compared to product retail which is very thin profits.

You can't take Amazon's quaterly reports at face value. Generally I'd agree that the profit margins in retail are low. Except if you're Aldi or Wal Mart or Amazon. The fact that Amazon posts huge revenues yet no profits is more because of their accountants than because of actual low profit margins. A fact that makes their stock owners more and more aggravated. Bezos likes to make investors think that profit margins are low but a lot of people have done a lot of digging around and found out that it is pretty far from the truth.

Amazon reinvests all of its profits into other business segments and it does so much more cleverly than for example Google or Facebook. Google especially is a huge money sink since their investments seldom go anywhere. Google and Facebook also have another problem, they will only continue to get that advertising money for as long as they are relevant as a platform. If people don't use their services anymore then they will no longer have access to those advertising dollars.

Amazon acquiring Twitch and turning it into Amazon's version of youtube makes a lot of sense. Firstly because Google makes a lot of money from advertisements on youtube. Enough in fact, so that they can offer the service for free, so it makes sense to get a piece of that advertising pie. Secondly because Amazon actually has stuff to sell so it can use twitch not only as a general ad platform but also as a way to guide more revenue streams to its own retail business.

Imagine the ads for a twitch game stream telling you that you can buy that game for a low prize on amazon. If they turned it up to eleven they could do video analysis and even tell you what type of clothes the persons wear and what stuff they own and where to order it on Amazon's own store. 'People who watched that video also bought...'

Some day my day dreams will belong to Amazon, won't they?

Yes, especially if you work there.

Yep, Amazon's culture is to use people like a car uses oil and change them just as frequently.

(http://sites.psu.edu/rcldiacont/wp-content/uploads/sites/5534/2013/10/billion.jpg)

One billion dollars.  Cash money. 

Literal forklift worth's of money.


That sentence makes less sense the more I read it to myself, but we're going with it anyways!

Looks like 11.5 forklifts.

In all seriousness though, this is one of the more bizarre choices to make for such a large purchase. Literally anyone can sink 200M into an online streaming service that would be better than Twitch's. In fact, they could probably also make a client in that amount and distribute it for free and have it be specialized for gaming and the particular service.

I'm not sure what Amazon is paying for here. Other than the eyes, which, frankly, doesn't make sense as all of the people who know and use twitch probably already have Amazon prime and shop there on the reg.

Google acquiring it made a tiny bit more sense because Youtube. But even then, nope.

Rumor has it Amazon is building an ad network to compete with Google. Twitch has about 1/6 the traffic compared to YouTube (1 billion minutes viewed per month vs 6 billion). YouTube was estimated to gross almost $6 billion in ad revenue last year. 1/6 of 6 billion = 1 BEELLION dollars in ad revenue.

I think you underestimate Twitch's value and way under-estimate how much it takes to build a streaming network.

BusinessInsider has some good numbers (http://www.businessinsider.com/statistics-about-twitch-2014-8) to see why Twitch is actually a pretty huge powerhouse in the live streaming scene.

Also, rumors have it that Google was in the running but Google wouldn't have let Twitch have autonomy, but Amazon promised them that (and they usually deliver in that regard with past acquisitions). 

And yeah, beyond the ad network it makes a lot of sense what Amazon is doing in the long run.  Wheither they execute it well or not is a different story, but they are setting themselves up in a good way.

Oops, I'm off by an order of magnitude. I thought it was 12 billion minutes for all of 2013, not 12 billion minutes per month.

So that's 10 BEELLION dollars in ad revenue a year (once the ad network is built up).

They're probably paying for not having to compete with Twitch. There's no reason for more than one video streaming service to exist and Twitch already has its claws in. Anything else would be the rough equivalent of G+ competing with Facebook.

The only reason Twitch is relevant is because Own3d was presumably run by morons.

Twitch is ran pretty poorly also. I'm just waiting for Valve to release their own streaming software.

LOL

That guy got bored/ wasn't popular enough to rally the troops and moved on to other projects.

I don't think it matters who starts what service now or how good or bad twitch is. Twitch is the place for game streaming and it has a large enough userbase to be worth buying just for them.

Edit: whether the gaming streaming world is worth a billion is another question.

It's not, especially for the reason Amazon is buying it.  They're going after eyeballs for advertising dollars and as the Marketplace report last night said, Twitch is 80% of all streaming traffic for the coveted 16-29 demographic.

However, anyone with ANY sense of the culture and audience knowledge would already know that minimum of 70% will be running adblockers. So Amazon just made several folks rich on a hell of an oopsie.

They're also going to start losing people as they implement the required DMCA take-downs for songs playing in the backgrounds.

It's harder to block the ads if they are being inserted into the video streams like YouTube does.

I'd prefer that over how they play now. I think you'd have fewer people blocking them.

I beg to differ. For the user end there's no difference. I've yet to see an ad on either site since installing ABE.

The only ads that bother me on twitch are the ones that BREAK the fucking player. They'll get halfway through the ad then just stop and I'll have to refresh the page for the player to work again.


What amazon needs to do though, is make it so when a streamer has a sponsor or ad for a <thing>, there's a little clicky that goes "buy the <thing> at amazon!" and it just goes into your amazon cart. Then their drones can ship it directly to the user and they'll never even have to change browser tabs!

This right here. I had my mind blown a year or so ago when I was watching YT at a friend's house and there was an ad; I've had AdBlockPlus installed for so long I didn't even know that was a thing.

I did always wonder why they can't just slip the ads into the video stream itself rather than relying on the client to pull up a whole separate chunk of media. Dealing with different regions and whatnot would be non-trivial but not in a way that strikes me as fundamentally insurmountable.

Depending on the site/app, the video serving and ad serving platforms are likely different, and from different companies and therefore different priorities. In part this is because ads served during pre- and mid- roll events change all the time (similar to TV broadcast) whereas the video itself doesn't. Trying to combine those into a single stream inspires Ghostbusters thinking :-)

Relevant article (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/26/technology/charting-the-rise-of-twitch.html?_r=1) that's honestly a surprise to me and I've both streamed and watched streams on twitch. The TLDR is twitch has more eyeballs than CNN or MSNBC and is occasionally breaking MTV's ratings. All in what's essentially the ultimate demographic for advertisers.


I am terrified by Amazon at the same time as I'm awed by them. Not to mention paid by them. If there's anything they know how to do, it's sell stuff.

That surprises me not even a little bit. No one under 40 watches TV anymore, not unless it's like HBO or <sports>.

Last year I watched:

Agents of SHIELD
Continuum
Leaf Games
The Weather Channel
Various Cartoon Channels with my Nephew

That's about it. If I want random background noise while I fold laundry or whatever, I turn on twitch or youtube to watch some asshole yell at his friends for sucking at video games. Half the time I end up watching Continuum and SHIELD on their websites too.

Are you sorting out streaming services from TV?  Do you lump in recorded shows from "TV" with the TV crowd?  There's a fuzzy area where I could either stream Game of Thrones or watch it on HBOGO.

If you're talking about preferring the typical Youtube Channel nonsense over scripted, professionally-produced entertainment, then that's something else.

Anyone who has watched any of those channels would know why this is happening. All of them are fuckawful wastes of I want to say "talent" but I know that's not the right word.

I don't count Netflix and whatever as TV.

But yea, I prefer youtube/twitch nonsense over watching that rerun of SG-1 for the 8th time. TV can't keep up anymore.

Hope I'm correct in being delighted it was Amazon and not Google, that ended up swallowing it. And that Amazon will leave it alone other than making it easier to click into Amazon store pages for various gear, music, and game goods.

If it was Google, they would have kludged things up by integrating into Google+ single signin (like the disaster with youtube, that really messed up things for many).

So the big 3 were CBS, ABC and NBC.

In 10 years it will be Google, Amazon and who else?

Youku?
Netflix?
Blip?

Yahoo  :why_so_serious:

Apple. Apple sells a whole lot of music, but it also sells a whole lot of books and movies.

Apple is the HBO of that list.

Being harder, generally speaking, to start a business in this era, we might just have Google and Amazon.

Yeah, there's no other big streamer coming. Apple, Netflix, Hulu etc will remain premium chanels as their model is already pay-to-watch.

Internet is replacing (and therefore defunding) cable faster than the cable companies can enact obstructionist laws to prevent it. Sometimes the gridlock of the political system can be a force for good.  This is, of course, why they're fighting so damn hard to keep their only trump card; being the pipeline.

He who controls the tubes control the webs.

I don't think Hulu will be in the top 3 since they've failed to go international so far. Netflix has managed to do that and might be the third (after Google and Amazon) big one or Apple if they manage to push themselves more into the non-apple hardware market.

TW/HBO. If they can they can take their blinders off, they are in a great position to be serious player.

Comcast has already successfully shaken down Netflix for extra money. If you have both, you're paying Comcast for your internet, and paying Comcast extra for the privilege of using Netflix's paid service.

Quite. I keep hoping that was a strategic move on Netfix's part and they'll pass along the cost to consumers along with a line-item on each months bill. "Comcast mandated fee"


I didn't mean to imply they'd be tin the top 3 of streaming services, just went with a familiar name for pay-to-stream services that are content aggregators.