So Amazon bought Twitch this week. Nine hundred seventy million dollars, all cash, announced last Monday (the 25th) after weeks of rumors that it was actually going to be Google and YouTube writing the check instead. I've been sitting on this one for a few days because I wasn't sure what I wanted to say about it that wasn't just "big company buys other big company, more at 11."
But then I remembered something and went and checked, and yeah, Justin.tv, the actual site, the one Twitch grew out of, shut down for good on August 5th. Twenty days before its own spinoff got bought for the price of a small country's GDP. Nobody really made a big deal out of it because by 2014 basically nobody was still using justin.tv for its original purpose, which was people watching some guy livestream his entire life through a headcam, a genuinely deranged premise when you say it out loud like that. Everybody had already migrated over to Twitch for the gaming stuff years ago. But I used to watch justin.tv back around 2008 or 2009, mostly late at night when I couldn't sleep, and there was this one channel I want to say was some guy in Seattle who just streamed himself coding and answering chat questions, and I'd have it open in a background tab for hours. Weird thing to be nostalgic about, I know.
Anyway. Twitch. I don't really know what to think about Amazon owning it. On one hand it's obviously not Google, and there was a lot of chatter back in the spring that a YouTube acquisition would've meant Twitch getting folded into YouTube Gaming or whatever they were calling it, which would've killed the actual streaming-community part of the site pretty fast. Amazon buying it standalone at least suggests they're going to leave the thing alone and let it keep being its own weird little ecosystem of emote spam and people watching other people play video games at two in the morning. I use it maybe three or four nights a week, mostly for one specific guy who plays through old JRPGs he never finished as a kid, chat scrolling by faster than anyone could possibly read it. That's the appeal, honestly, more than the gameplay itself. It's just noise and company.
What worries me a little is the ads. Amazon does not have a great track record of leaving things alone once it owns them (see: everything about how a Kindle book you "bought" isn't actually yours, a rant for another day). I'd bet real money we see pre-roll ads creep in that weren't there before, and some kind of Prime tie-in within a year of the deal closing. I hope I'm wrong. I probably won't be.
Unrelated tangent, but it's been that kind of month online. Everyone and their cousin has been doing the ice bucket challenge for weeks now, and my inbox currently has three separate nomination emails in it that I've been very deliberately ignoring. I did donate, for the record, I just have zero interest in filming myself shivering on a lawn. I did watch the Bill Gates one someone sent me, though, where he built an actual rig with a bucket on a frame and a lever so nobody had to dump it on him by hand. Such an engineer's answer to "how do I do this dumb internet thing," and I kind of loved it for that.
I don't have a tidy way to connect the two, Amazon buying Twitch and half the internet pouring ice water on itself for charity, except that it's been one of those weeks where the whole thing feels unusually alive. Overwhelming some days, in a way I mostly don't mind. Feels like there's more happening per week right now than there was back when I started writing here. Might just be me paying closer attention these days. Might not be.