Amazon has bought gaming platform Twitch for $1bn, letting the online retail giant tap into the new phenomenon of social gaming.
Twitch has earned the reputation for becoming the ‘YouTube of streaming gameplay’ and rose to mainstream attention earlier this year for its mass Pokemon marathon event.
The deal also freezes rival Google out of the picture, which was also reportedly interested in buying Twitch.
The three-year-old, San Francisco-based Twitch streams games being played for non-playing viewers to watch, and hosts gaming events.
It lets viewers to chat with the players and others, lending it some of the qualities of social networking websites, and it sells advertising to generate income.
The company claims 55 million visitors a month to its website, via desktop computers, tablets and smartphones, and more than one million ‘broadcasters,’ gamers who stream video of their games over the internet via Twitch.
Twitch was given a massive boost by both Sony and Microsoft’s decision to bake the service into their latest gaming consoles, allowing gamers to upload real-time videos of their gaming sessions.
It also says that visitors log in long periods on the website, averaging 106 minutes a day per person, putting it in the leagues of streaming video like Netflix.
That would support Amazon in its fight to capture a large share of the streaming audience market.
The online retailing giant is already pressing hard to add users of its streaming movie service, hoping to overtake Netflix.