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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."
For mysterious reasons that will be 'explained' only by spokesweasels emitting word salad, this will become the Big Bad Scary antitrust issue of the day, while the rapid consolidation of physical network infrastructure (despite the radically higher barriers to entry) will quietly recede into the background.
Bummer =/
This channel has been suspended due to multiple copyright claims from Nintendo of America.
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.
Since by YouTube's standards, everything on Twitch is a 'copyright violation' (streaming footage of a video game and completely ignoring that most of it is Fair Use with added content) I really have to wonder how they intend to deal with the corporate trolls who are now going to descend on Twitch like the vultures they are.
I imagine that will involve giving most of the money currently going to the content creators to the copyright asserters. The RIAA model.
Extinguish.
I know Twitch TV and Justin TV are closely linked. I think in fact that Twitch is an offshoot of JTV and the user accounts are shared. Is YouTube buying JTV as well, will JTV go on independently, or will JTV be shut down?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
Back when I was a kid the last millenium (80-90s), a billion as a lot of money. It was a domain that only Bill Gates and a handful of other chosen few were allowed to occupy. Now every damn internet start up is getting a billion each at least, often in the double digits.
Shit with absolutely no real world business prospects to justify the price they command. Are we in Internet bubble 2.0?
Hell, I don't even get why people watch athletics on tv. Talk about dull. I'd rather play the damn sports casually than just watch it on tv.
right next to that 48.5 billion article doesn't it
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).
I kind of wondered the same thing until I started watching. I originally went there to look at actual game play footage for a game I was thinking of picking up. In the process I found a few streamers who I actually enjoyed watching. They were funny, interactive with their viewers, and pretty good gamers to boot. Now I go back pretty much every day to watch while I work or surf. It's replaced some TV and podcasts as my "background noise".
Keep in mind most of the smaller streamers (and those tend to be the more entertaining to watch) are not e-sports try-hards. Their play is more casual. I tried a few of the bigger streams but yet, just watching someone team grind to keep their K/D is boring as watching golf.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
The caveat is pretty hilarious though. "When subscriber base is high".
How many people can claim a high subscriber base? The entire point of Twitch is that it lets you monetize niche content that won't attract millions.
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.
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