After months of speculation, popular streaming service Twitch recently announced that it was being acquired by online retail giant Amazon.
(See: Microsoft thinks it can sell more Xbox Ones by going exclusive with Amazon India)
While initial reports had hinted at a Google buyout, Twitch CEO Emmet Shear stated in a letter to its community that they chose Amazon instead due to their shared values and long-term vision.
Founded in 2011 as a spinoff of streaming website Justin.tv, the site’s growth quickly outpaced that of its parent site, with an average of 43 million viewers a month by 2013. By 2014, the company had changed its name to Twitch Interactive and shut down Justin.tv.
Justin.tv, the progenitor of Twitch, was recently closed due to being outpaced by the latter.
However, this exponential growth has not been without its downfalls. The service has been known to occasionally suffer outages due to excessive load on its servers. In Asia, this problem has become exacerbated by the fact that the service currently only provides one server, located in Singapore, for the entire region.
With Amazon’s acquisition, Twitch now finds itself with a fresh influx of capital. The retail giant is spending $970 million on the acquisition, $970 million that Twitch will likely spend on boosting its infrastructure.
For Asia, this likely means more servers to handle the growing market for live streaming games. The region is already a hot bed for eSports, which represents one of the largest markets for streaming. The release of next generation console such as the Playstation 4 and Xbox One with built-in Twitch streaming capabilities only promises to fuel this growth even more.
(See: Report: PS4 could come to China this year, and without region-locking)
Companies involved in streaming are already excited about the acquisition. One such company is Splitmedia Labs, maker of XSplit, one of the main applications players use to stream their games on Twitch.
“We’ve seen live streaming being heavily adopted in countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan in recent years,” says Louis Vigil, community manager at SplitmediaLabs.
With Twitch’s acquisition, the expectation is that the service’s growth will have a positive impact on the streaming market in the region. “As internet infrastructures continue to improve at a high pace in other territories,” continues Vigil, “ we’re optimistic that Twitch’s recent acquisition by Amazon will have an impact on the these emerging markets thanks to their combined technologies and reach.”
Aside from having a development office in the Philippines, Splitmedia Labs has also been active in sponsoring eSports events elsewhere in the region, such as the 2014 South East Asia Major in Singapore last June.
Last June’s SEAM2014 tournament was sponsored by both XSplit and Twitch.
Twitch is also heavily involved in eSports events in the region. The company, alongside new corporate parent Amazon, is currently involved with the Capcom Pro Tour Asia presented by Razer, a series of tournaments that is visiting multiple countries within the region. Prior to this, like Splitmedia Labs, Twitch had also been a sponsor for the 2014 South East Asia Major, and had even sent a couple of unsigned American players to compete at the event.
We contacted Twitch for a statement regarding how the acquisition affects its plans for the region, but the company has yet to reply to our emails. That said, its continued involvement, alongside its new corporate parent, in events in the Asia region seems to be indicative of both companies’ confidence in streaming’s growth in said region; growth that the acquisition should allow Twitch to take advantage of.
More about Twitch’s ongoing growth:
Twitch to support live streaming for mobile games
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