Amazon Officially Buys Twitch | Ars Technica

Amazon has officially purchased Twitch.tv for $970 million. In Twitch’s announcement of the deal, CEO Emmett Shear repeatedly thanked the Twitch community for helping build the company, and that “with Amazon’s support we’ll have the resources to bring you an even better Twitch.”

via Amazon officially buys Twitch for $970 million, will remain independent | Ars Technica.

Fairly surprising news today considering the news media had all but guaranteed the Google purchase of Twitch several times over the last few months. The news states that Twitch is to remain an “independent” operation, so this may be a pure business decision to capitalize on future ad revenues. This could be a boon for streamers like myself who also act as Amazon partners through their various sites and social media. Perhaps they will provide some sort of greater integeration? Who knows?

This makes some sense, considering Twitch’s much-maligned content ID system, recently implemented, is a different company, and therefore algorithm, than Google’s own system. The “censoring” mechanism was definitely helping to pave the way for a major purchase, and it makes sense that a company other than Google has stepped in.