There’s nothing like a good acquisition to make sense of those unfathomably large numbers. Two Twitches will buy you an Oculus VR, we’ve learned, but one Twitch is worth more than two Evil Genius-built AI firms.
How do we know that? Because Google are said to have scooped up the premier streaming service for a reported $1 billion.
Google’s YouTube division have agreed a deal with Twitch to acquire the company, say Variety’s sources.
The acquisition is expected to be announced publicly in the near future – but Google are preparing to have their purchase challenged by the US Justice Department.
YouTube is far-and-away the internet’s most successful video platform, as we all know – serving six billion hours of moving images to a billion users every month. It’s also Twitch’s most conspicuous competitor for streamed gaming and eSports events – and the move stands to be judged as anti-competitive.
Twitch was founded less than three years ago, if you can believe that. Today it has more than 45 million users and over a million uploaders a month. In March, Twitch accounted for 1.35% of downstream bandwidth on all America’s fixed-access broadband networks. That’s nearly three times the total reported last Autumn.
YouTube itself was acquired by Google eight years ago, for $1.65 billion. Funny how this sort of thing goes, isn’t it?