Okay so by now you've probably seen it everywhere: Amazon is buying Twitch. Announced Monday, all cash, $970 million. I've had the tab open since it broke and I keep rereading the number because it still doesn't feel real for a site that, three years ago, was just the gaming offshoot of Justin.tv that nobody outside a pretty niche crowd had heard of.
Here's the thing though. My first reaction wasn't shock about the price. It was relief that it's Amazon and not Google.
Back in the spring there'd been pretty persistent reporting that YouTube was the one circling Twitch, and I remember being genuinely anxious about that. Not because I dislike YouTube, I use it constantly, but because anyone who has ever tried to stream or even just watch a stream that had licensed music playing in the background knows exactly what Content ID does to that kind of content. It doesn't ask questions. It just mutes you, or strikes the video, or demonetizes it, sometimes for a ten second clip of a song playing on someone's second monitor. Twitch already has copyright headaches on VODs, sure, but the live side has mostly been left alone, and a huge amount of what actually makes Twitch fun is the parts that would get flattened by an automated bot with zero context. I don't think Google is evil for building Content ID, it solved a real problem for them, but I really did not want to watch it get pointed at every stream of Hearthstone with someone's Spotify playing.
So when that deal reportedly fell apart in July over what everyone assumed was antitrust concerns (Google already owns YouTube Gaming's ambitions, basically), and then Amazon showed up instead, I'll admit my gut reaction was something close to relief, which is a weird thing to feel about a $970 million acquisition of a company I have no financial stake in whatsoever. I just watch a lot of Twitch. I've dabbled in streaming myself, badly, mostly indie platformers to an audience of maybe four people including my roommate, and the thought of Google-ifying the whole thing made me nervous in a way Amazon doesn't, at least not yet.
That's not to say I'm not a little wary. Amazon isn't exactly a company known for leaving things alone once it owns them. There's already speculation flying around about Amazon Prime bundling in ad-free Twitch or exclusive streamer deals tied to Amazon accounts, and honestly some of that seems like a pretty obvious move for them to make eventually. I don't think Twitch stays exactly as it is for very long. Nothing does once a company this size buys it. But there's a difference between "this will change" and "this will get worse in the specific way I was already dreading," and for me the Content ID thing was the specific dread.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: my own streaming attempts have been sabotaged less by any acquisition drama and more by my ISP absolutely throttling upload speeds after about 9pm, which is, infuriatingly, exactly when anyone would actually want to watch a stream. I've got maybe 700kbps up on a good night and it craters after dinner. Doesn't matter who owns the platform if the pipe itself can't push out a stable 720p feed. That's an infrastructure problem nobody in Seattle is going to solve for me.
Anyway. Ninety-seven million monthly unique visitors was the number Twitch was touting earlier this year, something like that, and I believe it, my own viewing habits alone probably account for an embarrassing chunk of my monthly bandwidth. Whatever Amazon does with the place, I hope they at least leave the weird, scrappy, slightly chaotic feel of it alone for a while. Give it six months and we'll know a lot more. For now I'm just glad the acronym in charge of my evenings isn't the one that already owns YouTube.