Amazon announced Monday it will buy Twitch for $970 million in cash, beating out an alleged $1-billion offer from Google. Business Insider reports video-game-centric Twitch accounts for nearly half of all live-streamed web content and comprises a staggering 1.8 percent of peak U.S. web traffic — fourth after Netflix, Google and Apple, according to Wall Street Journal numbers. The site had 45 million users by the end of 2013, according to The Guardian, and more than half its users spent 20 hours each week or more watching streamed content, BI reported. Twitch commanded 43.6 percent of live streams surveyed by video networker Qwilt, more than twice the viewers of No. 2 World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., that had 17.7 percent of online streams. No words yet on how many viewers float streaming porn services. Media, including The Guardian, reported in May that Twitch had turned down an offer from Microsoft and and was in talks with Google, that company allegedly offering $1 billion to merge Twitch with YouTube. Neither company confirmed the deal. Jeff Bezos in a news release spouted some jargon and talked candidly about how much closer the Amazon empire is to global domination.
I have no issue with Amazon. They are probably one of the best customer service companies out there. Their customer support is fantastic, responsive and always helpful. They seem to be extremely reactive when there are issues and try to adapt to what people want. I understand people may be against the whole mega-corp.. but there are a lot worse places then Amazon.
Their customer service is excellent, without a doubt; of course, most businesses manage to have great customer service when they are trying to muscle their way into a marketplace. The question becomes how well they hold to that commitment once they have a commanding market share, particularly if they can save some money by scaling down their customer service to the bare minimum tolerable by their clientele. In the case of Amazon, they're still in competition with the box stores for a lot of their business, and they largely do a decent job. But I have few illusions about megacorps and monopolies.
I just have this image in my head of Google in serious conversation with Twitch and Amazon just drives by with the middle finger up throwing money out of the car. Also, can we move this to off topic instead of SC?
No worries. There are so damn many game specific general areas now that it's an easy mistake to make.
You set up a company and get all kinds of bs complaint about all the ways you're running it wrong and then someone offers you a deal where you personally net something like 200M $ for it and get to keep working there mostly like business as usual. Seriously, if an offer is good enough there is just no sense whatsoever in rejecting it. "Have some donuts" -"nah, I'm good".
Every now and then megacorps need a new CEO. Eventually some CEO will run for the post by promising *insanely good* dividends to shareholders. Shareholders like the proposal and vote him in. Now, he's running a megacorp that everyone absolutely loves but isn't making as outrageous profits as he needs to fulfill his promise. Answer - cut back on all the costs that take at least 1-2 years to hit the consumer awareness. Most of us can tolerate a 'whoopsie' from our favorite company. "Sure, no big deal, you guys have been great to me thus far". But eventually it starts to sink in that "holy shit, this company's really hit rock bottom". About the same time you recognize that you can read from the news that the company is handing out *record* dividends and after a short 'cooldown' period the CEO will resign and move on but not without getting something like 100M $ (or more) handout that was put in his job contract for whenever he'd leave or be forced to leave the post.
I want a job where if I fail miserably at it I will be paid enough money to never work another day in my life!
