Report: YouTube Buying Twitch.tv For $1 Billion

Variety reports that Google's YouTube unit has reached a deal with Twitch.tv to buy the game-streaming service for $1 billion. From the article: "The deal, in an all-cash offer, is expected to be announced imminently, sources said. If completed the acquisition would be the most significant in the history of YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006 for $1.65 billion. ... YouTube is preparing for U.S. regulators to challenge the Twitch deal, according to sources. YouTube is far and away the No. 1 platform for Internet video, serving more than 6 billion hours of video per month to 1 billion users worldwide, and the company expects the Justice Department to take a hard look at whether buying Twitch raises anticompetitive issues in the online-video market."

Comments

Twitch is not exactly a money maker

[Anonymous Coward]

the amount of cash it costs to make live video is not cheap twitch is not really a money maker look at other game streaming sites they all went bottom up becouse of that reason.

twich doesnt have a ton of users compared to youtube and the biggest streams usually dont do twitch advertising but get sponsorship deals.

on the other hand google does have the servers available for it so if the rumour is true (which i doubt) it could be cheaper then expected to run the service

Re:Twitch is not exactly a money maker

[Luckyo]

Twitch.tv however has a lot of profitable users. People actually subscribe and pay money on monthly basis, PER CHANNEL and portion of that goes to twitch.tv.

Youtube on the other hand has a lot of users, but they are nowhere near as lucrative. It comes with twitch's role as a very specialized service.

Re:Twitch is not exactly a money maker

[GeorgieBoy]

A couple things:

- As someone else mentioned, Twitch Turbo users simply removes adds for the viewer, but does NOT affect the channel operator's ad revenue. Users get the "Turbo" icon in chat
- Channel subscribers get access to subscriber emotes in chat (usable across all of Twitch) in addition to the subscriber icon for that channel, and sub-only chat (if applicable - generally only streamers that have very high simultaneous viewers enable this, to keep chat usable for subscribers).
- "Transcodes", i.e. quality options of low/medium/high in addition to "Source", can become available when a channel reaches a certain threshold of simultaneous viewers. While having partnership can mean the streamer always has them, it is NOT required for transcodes to become available.

Re:Twitch is not exactly a money maker

[tlhIngan]

Twitch picked up a lot of users recently though.

Between the PS4 and Xbone, both of which can stream and upload to twitch, that's probably at least a million content producers out there. And that doesn't include all the content producers twitch had to band for non-gaming-related content.

What will likely happen is a lot of that migrates to YouTube - so all those PS4 sex shows that were on twitch will just be on YouTube instead (since the PS4 doesn't, at least I don't think, support YouTube yet for content producers. You can watch YouTube videos, but you can't record with the PS4 and upload to YouTube. Though maybe the last update solved that).

And gamers will seek gamer content - if you're on the PS4 or Xbone, switching to YouTube to figure out how to defeat that boss is par for the course. In other words, there's a guaranteed audience looking for guaranteed content.

Hell, I'd like to watch twitch, but the 30 second beer commercials every 30 seconds got tiresome fast. (Especially for crap mass-produced American beer, and I don't drink, so it was wasted advertising money).

Re:All of Twitch is a 'Copyright Violation'

[jones_supa]

There is already another Twitch called Hitbox.

Re:So, my bet:

[Anonymous Coward]

Antitrust laws. Microsoft had trouble with them years back. The idea behind these laws is to promote competition between companies, so if a giant tries to buy their only competitor and become, effectively, a monopoly, the government can step in and block the deal.

Publicly traded does not matter

[sjbe]

Why would regulators care at all about this deal? Twitch isn't a public company.

Whether a company is traded publicly or not is irrelevant to anti-trust concerns. The only thing that being a publicly traded company means is that the stock is traded on an exchange. That's all. Many large companies are not publicly traded and anti-trust regulators are concerned with whether the merger will adversely affect consumers and competition in the market. Whether the stock is traded on a stock exchange is completely unimportant to the analysis.