Google’s subsidiary YouTube has acquired Twitch.TV for $1 billion. This has been confirmed by Twitch investors, who will see a huge return on investment, but no official confirmation has come from YouTube or Twitch.
In May, Variety revealed the Twitch.TV deal was in its early stages, it looks like YouTube has finally finished the deal. It is still $1 billion, meaning Twitch.TV couldn’t get YouTube to go any higher, a pretty decent price for the service.
YouTube will oversee the acquisition, instead of their owners Google. Twitch.TV will most likely remain separate from YouTube’s core service, but we will see more integration between the two video services, hopefully bringing advantages to both.
The deal has come under some criticism for being anti-competitive, considering YouTube is already the number one video service. Twitch.TV offers a different type of video streaming for eSports, alongside being a popular service for professional gamers.
This has opened up games like League of Legends and DoTA 2 to a larger audience. On Twitch.TV, eSports tournaments could grab around 100,000 to 300,000 concurrent viewers and millions of unique views per day, something YouTube is eyeing up.
The landscape of eSports is changing and we are starting to see it becoming a more serious event. Big sponsors are putting millions down to become the face of the tournament and these aren’t just computer parts companies anymore.
Fans of Twitch.TV worry that the acquisition will bring YouTube’s pesky contentID features to the live video site. This means streamers will not be able to play music and Twitch steams may be took down or blocked in certain countries.
This could vastly limit the success of some professional gaming streams that may not use commentary or humor to keep fans. It may also force new regulations on tournament music, something currently unregulated on Twitch.TV.
We will still have to wait for an actual confirmation before we can go into more depth about the acquisition, right now it is still a very strong rumor.
