Wow. Google buying them made a lot of sense for deeper integration of live-streaming services into YouTube and going after current-gen console owners... but Amazon?
I've been an Amazon Prime customer for years, spend thousands of dollars a year at Amazon, but have never once used Amazon Prime for their video or audio content. Go figure.
Edit: If you use Amazon Prime for video/audio content, I'm curious!
It's definitely worth checking out. I've been using Amazon Prime Video as much as Netflix the past year or so. Probably more, actually, because of the ability to rent/buy movies that aren't available on Netflix or Amazon's free video selection (which doesn't seem to be far off from Netflix now).
I explained my perspective, and was looking for other's to share theirs. I just don't understand what the service offers compared to Hulu or Netflix, that's all.
A statement of fact is not really a perspective. You just said you paid for prime but don't use prime video but forgot to say WHY. Now you have, but your original post was seriously lacking.
For all we know you didn't use Prime Video because of any number of reasons, you had satellite internet, it didn't work right, you didn't like their content catalogue, you can't get the video in the right rooms, you didn't know it existed, et al.
Rule 1 about online discussions is: People can only read what you actually send. Not read your mind. Your post was vague and pointless and added nothing to the thread until you further clarified AFTER I asked you to.
I went back to cable last year after years of Netflix/Hulu for my tv needs (there isn't a better option than Comcast for ISP and the Internet + Cable + HBO deal was more or less the same I was paying for Internet + Netflix/Hulu + TiVo), and Prime video has been a pretty adequate replacement for a lot of what I had been using Netflix to watch (which, honestly, is primarily children's programming, so your mileage may vary).
Doctor Who. That's the only reason I use Amazon Prime Instant Video. I like Prime for the shipping and the no-extra-cost Kindle books, but with the Instant Video, I just use it to watch the back catalog of Doctor Who.
Although the HBO content is tempting, and we do use it to watch Under the Dome as well.
I am using Amazon Music right now to listen to my music library. Recently, they made available every disc I have every purchases on Amazon available on the cloud. They are also making lots of additional discs available through Prime streaming.
I also use Amazon Fire TV to watch television shows and movies. May are included with a Prime subscription, others can be rented or purchased. My impression is that Amazon's compression and overall performance is better than NetFlix and Hulu Plus.
Their recent acquisition of HBO content has me using their streaming service pretty regularly now, but I'm almost done with The Wire now so I'll probably be using it less in the near future.
In the past, I have purchased currently running seasons of shows that I don't get on cable, like Doctor Who, Top Gear, and Parks and Rec.
If you have an Amazon FireTV and been noticing all the game updates on it lately it seems they're pretty serious about being a cheap console for the living room.
Good point. From a niche advertiser's point of view, this is better than regular TV. TV shows have product placement, but rarely revolve entirely around a product. But every "Let's Play" on Twitch is, on one level, an extended, entertaining commercial e.g. an infomercial. Which would make Twitch a massively interactive 24/7 infomercial, like QVC for gamers. To the eyes of Amazon, the internet's store for everything, that must be very attractive. It also raises the question of whether you could have a Twitch for other categories i.e. a 24/7 niche infomercial network that people actually want to watch.
I'm not so sure that would be very viable. Right now, the top 4 most viewed games on Twitch are LoL, CS, Dota and Hearthstone, none of which can be bought on Amazon. Additionally, 3 of them are free-to-play.
Pre-acquisition announcement! The timing of the two is so similar I think it's beyond likely that the anti-copyright protection wasn't a part of the negotiations.
Something no-one else seems to have mentioned in response to you is avoiding monopolies. Various changes to youtube regularly piss off people uploading content to the platform, so having a competitor (twitch) gives them somewhere to run to, and competition in the video market.
Amazon has a bit more leverage against game publishers than Google, I'd imagine. I don't think they're likely to use it in this manner, but it's there.
This assumes that it's game publishers where there's a copyright problem, which given the recent Twitch muting of copyrighted audio, is probably not the issue that most people are concerned about right now.
I thought it has previously been confirmed a few months ago that Google was acquiring Twitch. Did that fall through or was the confirmation later retracted?
There was no actual press release from either. All the 'confirmations' were just. Just the other week someone from Twitch was on HN and said he was unable to comment on any possible future acquisitions.
Months of rumors, which no doubt corresponded to ongoing negotiations, and then about a month ago a single VentureBeat reporter claimed a final deal was "confirmed" by anonymous sources. A lot of people were skeptical of a single unsourced claim, and seemingly rightly so.
"Before, we had only off-the-record reports from possibly-official sources that something might be happening. Now, we have off-the-record reports from definitively official sources that something might be happening. But we can't, y'know, prove that."
They've since updated the article to reflect the Amazon purchase but no mention of an apology for getting the story dead wrong. The only thing confirmed is their lack of respect for their readers.
Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to acquire Twitch, a live-streaming service for videogame players, for more than $1 billion, according to a person who has been briefed on the matter.
The deal could be announced as soon as Monday, the person said.
Google Inc. had earlier been in talks to acquire Twitch, but those talks cooled in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
Twitch, launched in June 2011, is the most popular Internet destination for watching and broadcasting videogame play. The startup raised $20 million from investors, including Thrive Capital and videogame-maker Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. in September.
News of the acquisition was earlier reported by tech website The Information.
This story is literally the first time I've heard of this site. Is it really popular enough to demand payment for reading the articles?
Looks like it was started on Dec. 04, 2013 [1] and has been subscription-based from the beginning. $40/mo or $400/year seems like a lot of money... any indication that they break news before any other site?
It's not designed for casual readers, it's designed for professional readers who read it for professional reasons. $40/month is nothing in that scenario.
There's nothing wrong with it, and I'm not holding anything against them. Just wondering if anyone here is a subscriber, what their target audience is, and if it's worth a subscription at the price they're asking.
$40/mo or $400/year seems like a lot of money... any indication that they break news before any other site?
The value prop isn't just breaking stories quicker than the next outlet, but we do happen to break a fair amount of news. For instance, we broke a story [1] last week that moved eBay's share price up by 4-6%. [2]
That's funny, the paywall-preview ends with the line:
The acquisition would help Amazon bolster its position in the fast-growing business of online gaming and... which doesn't show up in your quote.
I believe the parent poster was posting an earlier version of the article. With breaking stories, news sites will sometimes post a small amount of initial information so they get the story out fast. Then, after more details are available, the article is edited to include more information.
So, this will change basically nothing about Twitch? I assume all of their infrastructure is already on Amazon, so probably more business as usual than having to move everything on to Google's infrastructure (which seems to usually derail product development for 3-6 months on most acquisitions).
Based on earlier reports of Justin.tv's streaming architecture[1], I'm going to say no.
Granted, that article is old, but I think a pretty serious investment in physical infrastructure has been made by Justin.tv/Twitch. So I'm more willing to believe they're still leveraging some variation of this architecture rather than AWS.
Regardless of who actually ends up buying Twitch, I'm happy to see that they are valued so highly. They are a great service and have helped make competitive gaming more mainstream due to exposure.
All of the top Twitch streamers have revenue sharing partnerships with G2A.com, a digital download videogame marketplace. It will be interesting to see if Amazon pushes their competing offer.
I am a Twitch partner and just last week I received a survey asking me my thoughts about affiliate marketing in regards to promoting free to play games, selling games, and relate peripherals. Seems timely now.
Valve has no need for adding on a hugely expensive live streaming site. Steam has very little serious and threatening competition and their own IPs (Dota and CS) are raking in cash along side their marketplace. They are doing well now and don't have the same stock holder expectations for growth as a public company would.
Twitch is not going to be another YouTube success story. There just aren't enough great uses for live streaming yet and video game streaming is very far from being mainstream. Twitch obviously can't believe it's very close to reaching NFL-like status either or it wouldn't sell for a mere billion and change.
Amazon or Google will piss off or drive away the Twitch user base. The users will all move to Hitbox.tv or any number of new sites that will pop up. It's easy to do live streaming, it's just expensive. This acquisition will bring funding and Yahoo will buy the next popular live streaming site.
It's true that video game streaming is far from being mainstream, but considering how engaged kids are in gaming now, I don't think it's far-fetched to see it only becoming more popular in the future.
There is already a lot of money in esports, so I'll go out on a limb here, and say that it's only a matter of time before it becomes mainstream.
I guess I'm too old to "get it". Why is watching other people play video games fun? I've been a gamer since the mid 80's and I don't see the appeal. Maybe if they hosted the Official Video Game Olympics or something, that might be cool.
But just watching someone else play Fallout 3? Talk about a lack of immersion. I don't get it...
> Maybe if they hosted the Official Video Game Olympics or something
I think it's just like any physical sport - having knowledge about a game and watching someone skilled play is interesting. People watch to learn and get better at something they find interesting. That said, watching someone play Fallout definitely isn't what gamers think of when you mention "eSports" - generally eSports refers to some level of competition, which is why real time strategy games and first person shooters are so popular - both require a lot of skill and knowledge of the game to be good at.
Getting back to the "Official Video Game Olympics" - there are actually some pretty serious competitions out there. Certain game developers have been known to self-host their own tournaments for millions of dollars in prizes (League of Legends and Call of Duty being two examples). There's also plenty of companies making a profitable business out of running these tournaments: ESL in Europe and Major League Gaming in the US being two of the bigger names out there right now. So in fact, the competition and prizes are very real, so anyone interested in a game may be interested in seeing who's going to win $1,000,000.
Additionally (and anecdotally my own experience): I don't really have time to play games much anymore, but I do have time to spend 30 minutes here and there watching someone play something.
It's nice that I don't have to invest the time it takes to get up to speed to know what's going on if the commentary's good -- and it's a solid, mindless contrast to TV for me (which has been phenomenally engaging lately. it's impossible to read emails and watch house of cards, which isn't true for game streaming :D)
The reasons why people watch other people play video games are several:
1. People like to see someone of a very high level play a game that they too play.
2. You often get to see someone playing a game that you never heard about. For instance: The recent speed running marathon streams have showed a lot of obscure and old games.
3. And most important: People are entertained by the commentary from the streamer.
If you just run a game with no commentary you will be hard pressed to get any viewers. It is more that with the younger generation games have become a huge part of culture and to see someone playing games you play as well and chatting give the viewer a social experience. There is chat too and the streamers often address people in chat. If you look at the most popular personalities on YouTube many of them are gaming related. People spend a lot of time playing today's very immersive, social, and large scale games so it follows that they can be entertained by personalities involved with them.
You're not the only one... a friend of me who works in the IT department for a big IT company says about 20% of their daily network traffic goes to Twitch nowadays. It's a bit ridiculous if you think about it but he said he has many colleagues who have a stream open on the background of one of their screens.
I think a cross between #1 and #3 is easily the lion's share of viewership, especially if the game is difficult and almost antagonistic toward the player. I'm reminded of the Youtube videos posted some years ago by ProtonJon of his Super Mario World ROM hack play-throughs. I'd never personally play them, but it's easy to get an almost schadenfreude-level of enjoyment out of watching someone else suffer through a game that's extremely punishing. The same easily applies to other games that most people wouldn't ordinarily play for a variety of reasons (too old, as in your example, or perhaps too frightening e.g. Amnesia--that one made the hair on my neck stand up).
I wouldn't watch someone else play Fallout 3, but I like watching people play competitive games like Hearthstone and SC2 because I feel like it makes me a better player. In the case of Hearthstone, the difference between watching and playing is minimal - it's basically the same if the streamer makes the play you would, and if not then you learn something (or, occasionally, get to feel clever because they didn't see your superior play).
That's a strange thing about Hearthstone. Watching a stream is almost as much fun as playing. You still get to make the decisions in your head since you have all the same information as the streamer.
Any real sport or just the ones you know? For example, baseball is really popular in the US but most people where I'm from would have a hard time watching it if you tried to pay them to: we don't know the rules of the game very well, we understand the strategies the teams use, we can't tell an exciting play from a boring one, etc.
With video games its a bit similar. If you played the game or something similar before you can appreciate whats going on but otherwise you will be completely lost and everything feels pointless.
Well 99% of the views come from competitive games being played online. For example, there are less than 40 people watching Fallout 3 as I type this, but over 120,000 watching League of Legends. So you're right to not get it, because that's not really something people do.
When players do watch a streamer play a single player game, it's usually because the game has recently been released, and they want to make an opinion on whether or not they should buy it. Or because they enjoy the streamer's personality and commentary. They're not watching Fallout 3, they're watching TotalBiscuit play Fallout 3.
99% is just plain wrong. What about lirik's night stream. They were playing Hanging with Friends and it had ~60k viewers only half that of Lol and more than WoW, CS:Go, or Hearthstone at the time.
I don't get people watching single player games but I watch people play competitively to keep an eye out for new strategies and I also have some teams I'm a fan of.
I watch some singleplayer streams mostly for the entertainment value. Just watching someone play isn't very fun, but some streamers have funny commentary and play the game is weird ways.
It's not very fun watching someone play Fallout, but it's entertaining watching someone play Fallout role-playing as a homicidal maniac that uses nothing but his bare fists. The sheer difficulty is impressive, and if coupled with a talent for presentation/humor it can be a pretty fun time.
This is a good idea for a stream unless someone is already doing it. I remember people doing hard runs of games like that, beating the whole game without any weapons etc. I'd definitely watch that if I'm interested in the game already.
Ha! I've got an 8-yr-old daughter that loves making gameplay videos. "Hi, my name is Isa, I'm 8, today I'm going to show you how I make this thing with Lego"... this year alone, she's recorded about 40GB of such videos. Sometimes she watches similar videos online.
I don't really get it, but she came up with the idea and started doing it by herself. There must be some sort of attraction to this thing.
The most watchable games are competitive multiplayer ones, e.g. starcraft, league of legends, dota. It's probably not very appealing to a non-gaming person, but the same can be said about baseball; I don't know rules and I'm pretty sure I won't understand anything going on in the field.
First of all, successful streamers tend to have entertaining personalities (at least their audience thinks so). Other than that, I think there are a few main reasons why people like it.
1. Sometimes you just want to veg out and watch something, not be an active participant. You can enjoy the game without putting in any effort.
2. There's a community aspect to it. In a single-player game like Fallout you get to see someone else enjoying and talking about what you enjoy, and you can interact with others who share the same interests.
3. Many of the people who stream are really good players. Almost no one reaches that level of play so for most people watching a streamer is the only way to experience it. They can also offer insights and help make you a better player.
It is kind of weird and not traditional... but it does make sense to a young'n like me.
I never understood how people could watch soccer/football and not get bored to death until the rise of esports. Now I often watch the league games for my favorite team and most of the world championship games.
A couple of things, one my kids like to hang out and watch me play, it was entertaining for them and they enjoyed seeing their dad get smashed by the monster. And second, for games like World of Warcraft where there difficult engagements with high level enemies (boss fights) it really helped to watch not one but several folks do the fight first before you could effectively participate[1].
What I find astonishing are Youtube "clip shows" on cable channels. These are "shows" where the hosts screen videos they found on Youtube and talk about them or rip them apart. I don['t get the appeal but apparently they fill the air time. Something which was a curated set of videos about a particular video game might actually have appeal to me, either from a shopping (I wonder if I would like it) to a mastery (I wonder what other people do at that stage) kind of thing. Not saying it would make money but I would be tempted to watch it. Some of the Eve commentary would make for an excellent show as well.
[1] - Blizzard however is doing what they can to make it unnecessary much to the demise of the 'fun' aspect.
Generally it's watching people play online games, not single player ones like Fallout. And usually the top streamers are very highly ranked in their respective games. A viewer gets a chance to learn things, root for someone they like, and maybe have aspirations of their own.
Think of it this way: imagine if Kasparov and Fisher live streamed all of their chess practice, informal competition, and formal competition. Odds are chess fans would line up to watch.
It's just like that, but with strategic online games instead of strategic board games.
Also, some of the streamers are practically comedians, so they sometimes watch for general comedy and enjoyment as well. Or a mix.
Chess, like the so called "video games" being streamed, ought to be called a sport. Some people who don't know the distinction between a single player game (ala tombraider) and e-sport is not going to be able to comment nor appreciate the power of streaming.
> Chess, like the so called "video games" being streamed, ought to be called a sport.
Other way around, I think. Competitive video games ought to be called "competitive games," like chess. The whole "e-sport" label is stupid: "sport" has always meant a primarily physical competition, and competitive games of the sitting-down type--chess, checkers, Go, Scrabble, etc.--have been their own thing, with leagues and tournaments and titles, for decades or centuries before video games came around. Video games are more dependent on quick thinking and reflexes, but they're still primarily mental competition--see also speed chess, etc.
But competitive video gamers are too full of themselves to be happy rubbing shoulders with something as unhip as chess. They insist that they deserve the same (arguably equally undeserved) acclaim and money and fandom as sports, so they keep pushing the "e-sports" label and all the associated silly trappings and theatrics. After two decades of fruitless flailing, it seems like it might finally be about to stick, more's the pity.
My daughters spend hours watching a hyperactive British guy scream at his Minecraft game. This, despite the fact that we limit the amount of time they spend online; it's the top priority for them.
When they play Minecraft, they make up their own commentary and they're dying to have their own show.
http://www.twitch.tv/cohhcarnage is a rather family friendly variety streamer. Be aware, though, that he does stream 18+ from time to time(he'll make it known in the title, though).
http://www.twitch.tv/giantwaffle is primarily a minecraft streamer, and he generally doesnt curse and explains what hes doing. Beware, he does do nightstreams with Lirik, including cussing. He'll announce these, though.
Most people watch big tournaments and/or high level competitive players (LoL, Dota2, cs:go, SC2). LoL and Dota2 run tournaments with prize money in the millions and the competing teams are fulltime players that live together and have coaches and sponsors, etc.
Imagine Messi (or some American star athlete, eg. LeBron) streaming his training via a GoPro. Fans would be very interested.
Single player / non-competitive games (such as your example, Fallout 3) are indeed much less exciting and get less viewers. There are also streamers that aren't very good at playing anything, but they're entertaining in one way or another and have built up a following that just watched them play whatever.
It is just the point at which TV/film and gaming converge. By watching someone play you get the relaxed cinematic/narrative quality of a TV show with the enagagement of a game.
I agree. When you look at companies like Major League Gaming who are becoming not only tournament hosts, but providers for online competition AND streaming you can't help but ask how popular gaming will become. MLG is already working with a developer in China to bring a video game arena/stadium to Hengqin Island.
A stadium. For video games.
The barrier to entry is just so much lower for video games when compared to professional sports - nearly anyone can play and get good enough to compete against the pros without even leaving their house. Personally I prefer "real" sports over their virtual counterparts, but millions of people disagree with me - and that number will only continue to grow. I think eSports are going to grow dramatically over the next 5 years.
There are a lot esports center in China. Unfortunately, tight regulation and culture bias make it so difficult to making money out of esports in China. But the true market potential is stunning, kids and adults, male and females, who are willing to spend money on esports related goods, touraments are huge, even with the absolute terrible business execution in China... When I am talking about terrible business execution, I mean outrageously ridiculous practices...
the thing is people are always building stadiums, large and small for things. its whether the sport actually sticks. arena football, minor league football, the tampa bay devil rays, many many olympic stadiums, on and on it goes. In the end a stadium is a building.
With the impact from the many health issues only just starting to be felt, I'd take a bet that esports are more popular than the NFL in another decade.
Depends on your definition of mainstream. I know some huge games like League of Legends, DOTA2, and Starcraft routinely do 6 figure concurrent viewer counts for tourneys. That is higher than a lot of TV. I personally have had 8,000 live viewers.
NFL like status is not attainable so lets not say that this is the business plan. Yes the users can move somewhere else, but for gaming twitch is the de facto site for streaming right now. There has been talk of switching sites whenever some streamers get aggravated but it would have to be a huge failure to have people switch en masse.
It is also not easy to do live streaming. It uses massive amounts of bandwidth, and you have to keep this going live to people all over the world. Twitch is the YouTube of video game streaming at the moment and it would be hard to unseat them.
I stream primarily fighting games (Street Fighter) which is a much smaller audience than the games I mentioned, but EVO world championships does over 130k live viewers every July. EVO is the largest tournament in Fighting games. Our demographic is very young, and we have a lot of serious fans that have actually come to our location from far away to play with us.
Keep in mind these are concurrent video viewers over the course of many hours. If you take video plays like Youtube does it measures in the many millions for a tournament like EVO.
I think your underestimating the potential of game streaming. Twitch might be a seemingly impossible distance from reaching NFL-like numbers on a single stream, but what about 1% of that audience on 100 streams? or 500 streams? They don't even need to have that, because twitch is streaming 24/7. Everyone will see a few YouTube videos a week, maybe even a few a day, but Twitch users will watch a stream for HOURS.
I completely agree. I'm not huge into watching streaming but I'll be more likely to stay watching a stream for a lot longer than a YouTube video. Which for advertising purposes. They have more opportunities for either on page ads or intermittent ads between rounds/matches. Combined with the fact that most streaming. You develop more interest and involvement with a player or players.
I don't care about a random keyboard or video card advertisement. But what keyboard or video card your favorite streamer is using seem like a far more valuable ad to pursue. The NFL and others have a lot of branding. And merchandising among teams. YouTube can't get people to buy shirts or random things of random funny fading videos. But I think it'd be a lot more likely for many to buy something relateded to longer term Fandom
I'll preface this by saying that I do believe esports will be the biggest international competition after soccer/football. I do agree that twitch won't be the end all be all in live streaming games. The barrier is very low and I think in a growing market, a company under amazon or google can't flourish.. where a startup that leaner and more in touch with trends could easily come out and compete.
Even if live-streaming video games (or other digital real-time content like screenshares) was a hot market, Amazon doesn't have as good a record as Google in integrating it's acquisitions.
Look at Audible - they still have their own crufty website (which uses the same credentials as your Amazon site, sure) and discovery and reviews are less usable there than on Amazon.com.
Also see Goodreads, DPR and IMDB - all places where things have essentially gone on "as before".
What good is "integrating" acquisitions? Users don't care about your org chart.
Amazon could clone Twitch fairly easily (bandwidth is the limiting factor and Amazon happens to have gobs of it), but they still bought the Twitch brand. It would be a ridiculous waste to throw that in the trash.
I think the integration is pretty good, personally. I mostly listen to books these days, and it's usually Audible books purchased through the Amazon site.
Audiobooks (both Audible and physical CDs) are listed side-by-side other types of book media on Amazon.com. To pick a random example, if you look up Steel World by BV Larson: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FCXPC94/ - you'll see the paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible audio edition, and sometimes others.
Some titles have "Whispersync for Voice", which I think is an impressive type of integration. With those titles, you can sync your progress between the Audible and Kindle formats, so that you don't lose progress when switching from reading to listening. Additionally, when you own one format, the price of the other format drops substantially (if I recall, usually to a few dollars). I count that as a deep and sophisticated type of integration between the Kindle store and Audible.
Whether I visit the Amazon.com site or Audible depends on my motivation. If I want to find a good book, and I'm willing to either read or listen, then I'll hit Amazon. If I'm looking specifically for an audiobook, I'll hit Audible. Also, I think the Audible site might have been redone since you've last seen it. The home page doesn't look like what was around before the acquisition. I see a modern, Amazon-style product grid on audible.com when logged in. It's also integrating content from Amazon such as "Based on your Amazon and Kindle book purchases, we think you'll enjoy...". The Audible site to me looks like a curated window into Amazon.com now.
You could have said all the same things about YouTube when they got acquired. It sold for around the same amount of money, it wasn't at all clear that online video was going to become mainstream, there were massive copyright issues, existing competitors, and it turned out very nicely for them.
I'll second that. College football (through whatever means I can get over here - i.e. most likely espn player this year) and twitch makes up 90% of the TV-style media I use.
>There just aren't enough great uses for live streaming yet and video game streaming is very far from being mainstream.
You may be right, but you may be wrong. Twitch is in a similar sort of space as sports - which are the best kind of content generators (and content is king). Piracy is largely side-stepped because value is highest when it is LIVE. New content is always created by incumbents and new challengers, and there is tons of opportunity for marketing.
I don't know what the future holds, but E-Sports are here to stay. It'll only get bigger.
>Twitch obviously can't believe it's very close to reaching NFL-like status either or it wouldn't sell for a mere billion and change.
Why not? Superbowl has 100 million viewers. 200 million viewers for the total NFL season. I don't think those numbers are that impressive, when Facebook gets 800 million active users per day, on 1.3 billion active accounts and Youtube gets 4 billion views per day. In fact, NFL is pretty much done. There is only so much money you can squeeze out of North America, and nobody else cares about it.
>The users will all move to Hitbox.tv or any number of new sites that will pop up. It's easy to do live streaming, it's just expensive.
It's easy to do Youtube. It's easy to do Facebook. It's easy to do Instagram. It's easy to do WhatsApp. Now go do it and see how well you do.
Twitch will more easily move to deliver IPTV broadcast of events to the cable-cutting netflix crowd than traditional media. I would be happy to bet long on them.
I mean we already see the start of it with YouTube broadcasting Coachella, etc. More recently, Twitch has been used to stream gaming-related real life stuff, like the Dota 2 International 4 after-party DJ set. Conversely, the big media conglomorates are still wrestling with how to deliver content online and most just mirror your cable subscription to your device, rather than offer IP-exclusive methods of delivery.
I don't think Amazon is the best fit for Twitch - I personally would've preferred some company who is in the entertainment industry and more willing to start breaching into broadcasting live concerts, sport, big events, etc. on it. Valve, for example, already uses Twitch pretty heavily during their events and has shown interest to move outside of gaming (they sell non-gaming software via Steam) but they're probably also not mature enough to really start becoming a fully-fledged media company either. I don't really know of one company who is ideal in that space.
That said, I don't think Amazon is the worst either. It'll be intersting to see how they take it.
Amazon is a pretty good fit for Twitch. Why? 1) Digital distribution is becoming the norm for video games. Amazon already sells physical media and purchase codes for many game platforms. It's a tie-in to sell product. 2) Amazon is breaking into ad serving to go head-to-head with Google and Facebook. Twitch will likely be the flagship content property for their ad network. Game publishers often spend just as much in marketing a game as they do in developing it (http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Most_expensive_video_games). Amazon stands to scoop up many millions (~100M?) in advertising revenue from the games industry alone. 3) Amazon already has a streaming delivery network whose subscription base they want to expand. If they can upsell (or merely sell) Prime to gamers, then that should supplement their ad income. 4) They already know how much it costs to run Twitch, because it's built on AWS.
The entertainment industry is notoriously short-sighted and generally parasitic when it comes to technology. It's also an industry that is extremely image conscious. Having uncontrolled/unedited content that runs counter to their image is anathema. If any game publisher or old guard broadcasting company had gotten its hands on Twitch, I strongly believe it wouldn't have gone well.
You would be surprised at the viewer numbers on twitch for any given night, just random sampling can show hundreds of thousands of viewers.
Plus a lot of the people who are streaming there do links back to Amazon, Newegg, and similar, for the gear they use or want. I am curious if Amazon will put pressure on the streamers to limit links to non Amazon sites for goods.
Plus with private streams its entirely possible they may leverage it into a webex type business.
Worth pointing out that's a lot of money -- if it becomes a large cultural force, they'll still get credit, if there's more money on the table... some people don't care about the difference in numbers that huge. So this takes a lot of variability off the table at a fairly marginal cost (no second giant yacht, etc).
In recent times Amazon has started making content exclusive to their own hardware (Amazon TV, Fire tablets/phones). Go check out the comparison chart here:
Note that aside from Apple's devices, Amazon Prime video works only on Amazon's own mobile hardware.
Is this why they're buying Twitch? To make it another "Amazon Exclusive" for Fire devices? Frankly that would explain a lot. If they can lock the content down it will force people into their ecosystem if they want mobile access.
Yes I think this is critical. You just don't buy Kindle stuff for games or you're going to be not only disappointed but at a terrible disadvantage because of the artificial lock-in. The Amazon App Store is much smaller than Play and iTunes (though improving), and the Fire TV has a very small and stagnant selection of games (and not really improving).
I agree. A big part of the valuation of twitch.tv is it's positioning in the market. It doesn't make sense to drastically shock that positioning while locking out a large contingent of users in the process.
If Amazon wanted a similar service to make exclusive to the Kindle ecosystem, it would make much more sense to grow one themselves with deep integration into the kindle line of products. They've done this with a lot of other products and services, and certainly have the capability.
With Twitch, it would seem to make more sense for them to continue to seek partnerships with gaming platforms so that the Twitch.tv brand is increasingly ubiquitous in gaming, and then use that as a relatively extrinsic source of growth.
I could see them locking out strategic players (hint: Google), and making certain events or content exclusive to the Kindle ecosystem, but locking everything down to Kindle doesn't strike me as a viable move.
Might be better to say that they have locked in their streaming content to Mac, Windows, Fire OS, iOS, all game consoles of the last two generations, 541 smart TVs, Google TV, a limited selection of DVRs, receivers and Home Theatre systems, most popular Blu-Ray players, Tivo, FireTV, Roku and several other streaming media players, and they have released music but not video for Android.
How much longer does Amazon have before investors start beating the drum to become profitable? Would love to see where Twitch fits into their bottom line--I guess it might help sell Fire TVs?
Well they've been given a pass for approximately 18 out of their 20 year existence, split into two segments of time.
There was a two year period of time after the dotcom crash was over where they were beaten on pretty heavily about the lack of profitability.
It really doesn't matter if investors beat the drums frankly. Bezos controls enough of Amazon's stock - roughly three times the next largest investor - it would be difficult to spar with him, short of the stock truly plunging (something like a 75% drop from here might do it). The Bezos family controls roughly as much stock as the next five largest owners combined.
The correct answer is: so long as Amazon's sales continue to grow at ... 15% to 25% per year, and the losses do not become life threatening again, the drums will never get loud enough to disrupt what Bezos wants to do.
I expect with a $100b +/- market cap, Amazon can continue to function without much external concern for quite some time. $100b or so mostly keeps them out of range of someone trying to buy them, and will enable continued acquisitions as needed, while not bashing shareholders too much on the downside such that everyone turns against Bezos. I see no reason they can't maintain that perpetually with zero profits, if sales continue to grow, given the sales scale they're likely to reach in the next decade. They will be given a serious sales multiple so long as sales keep growing relatively quickly. Investors will focus on that and be placated by the kool-aid. When sales growth stops, investors will shift to demanding profits and dividends.
There would have to be some catastrophic setbacks, big losses, and a pause in sales growth, to force Bezos into changing his approach. I suspect at that point he would step aside and become just chairman.
However, keep in mind, Amazon would love to have a cash cow. They'd love nothing more than to print up $4 billion per year in profit from the fire phone, or from their new advertising initiative. So they can show profits, boom the stock, and perpetually run a tight margin business everywhere else.
I think you have it all right except for the end. If Amazon made an extra 4 billion dollars a year they would use it to attempt to dominate yet another market. There are businesses inside the company that do make profit and they are already reinvested into longer term seed projects.
A better way to phrase the question would be 'when will amazon stop reinvesting every cent of gross profit into growth (AWS, fire phone etc all have large Capex that could have been booked as profit).
In my opinion the answer to this question is whichever comes first of Jeff Bezos dying, amazon being the largest company in the world or amazon imploding and going broke.
Can we please have a rule against posting paywall links? I know we can find a cached version or search on Google or whatever, but it's still frustrating! We're not talking about work-arounds.
Imagine what our reaction will be if someone posts a link to their own blog which doesn't allow visitor to read the content without paying $1. Even if they have a work-around like you can inspect element and hide the paywall popup.
The submitter can find another outlet and submit that. Submitting a paywall article is like submitting an item with no link at all, with text content "google it."
The site is called Hacker News, not Hacker Support broken business models that keep content off the open web but get traffic by faking it.
For the majority of readers here there is no news at the end of that link, just and advert for the WSJ's paywalled services. It's effectively spam for most of us.
The WSJ's article isn't a summary of The Information's original story. They confirmed the report based on their own sources, which is completely legitimate even if they weren't the first ones to break the story.
In this case, linking to the WSJ article wasn't helpful or advisable, and isn't in the best interest of readers. First of all, it's paywalled, and requires a Google search as a workaround, and not every reader is aware of that.
The main issue with it is that it doesn't bode well with the requirement for original reporting. In this case, there are 4 sources of which I'm aware (The Information, WSJ, Bloomberg and Recode) who reported on this, and all of them were original reports. Even if The Information was first to press, they all conducted their reporting indepedently and the fact that four sources have the same information is very relevant. By linking to only one original report, you're depriving the average HN reader of knowledge of this journalistic consensus.
Even if the link had to be to an original report, it would make more sense to link to The Information, which is also paywalled, but was first to press. But really, I'd prefer the top HN link to be to a site like Ars Technica, which diligently compiled all the different reports.
The reason they closed down your "cable TV service" was largely because it was your "cable TV service". Compared to twitch that website must have been an absolute nightmare to run.
You may as well complain "I'm upset that the city bulldozed all of those crack houses; they were a really great place to buy crack."
264 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 3644 ms ] threadWhat are you working on, Jeff?
Amazon also has a lot of tv shows and movies through Amazon Prime now. So they have something to do with video. Somewhat.
Edit: If you use Amazon Prime for video/audio content, I'm curious!
Or was that just a very strange anecdote about your person usage of their services?
For all we know you didn't use Prime Video because of any number of reasons, you had satellite internet, it didn't work right, you didn't like their content catalogue, you can't get the video in the right rooms, you didn't know it existed, et al.
"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"
Which is to say, it offers all the stuff you use Prime for.
Although the HBO content is tempting, and we do use it to watch Under the Dome as well.
I really wish they'd include Unlimited Kindle as part of Prime :-/
I also use Amazon Fire TV to watch television shows and movies. May are included with a Prime subscription, others can be rented or purchased. My impression is that Amazon's compression and overall performance is better than NetFlix and Hulu Plus.
Also watched all of star trek etc on there. A bunch of stuff.
It's not great, but it gets the job done.
In the past, I have purchased currently running seasons of shows that I don't get on cable, like Doctor Who, Top Gear, and Parks and Rec.
If you have an Amazon FireTV and been noticing all the game updates on it lately it seems they're pretty serious about being a cheap console for the living room.
As an experiment: Compare trying to get somebody from Google support on the phone vs. Amazon.
http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/24/googles-1b-purchase-of-twi...
The reporter doesn't sound very contrite: http://venturebeat.com/2014/08/25/amazon-could-steal-twitch-...
(That's also the case today, BTW.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/08/25/amazon-pounce...
The deal could be announced as soon as Monday, the person said.
Google Inc. had earlier been in talks to acquire Twitch, but those talks cooled in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
Twitch, launched in June 2011, is the most popular Internet destination for watching and broadcasting videogame play. The startup raised $20 million from investors, including Thrive Capital and videogame-maker Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. in September.
News of the acquisition was earlier reported by tech website The Information.
https://www.theinformation.com/Amazon-Nears-Deal-to-Acquire-...
Looks like it was started on Dec. 04, 2013 [1] and has been subscription-based from the beginning. $40/mo or $400/year seems like a lot of money... any indication that they break news before any other site?
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/Letter-From-the-Editor1
I wouldn't put having a paywall against them. Capitalism will do the work.
The value prop isn't just breaking stories quicker than the next outlet, but we do happen to break a fair amount of news. For instance, we broke a story [1] last week that moved eBay's share price up by 4-6%. [2]
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/PayPal-s-Future-Still-in-Play
[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=EBAY+Interactive#symbol=E...
Ever want to get around a WSJ paywall?
Simply copy and paste the article title into Google search and then click on the Google News link in the search results. Presto you are in.
Hypothetically, they limit the amount of stories you can read like this, but personally I have yet to hit this threshold, whatever it may be.
The full text can be obtained for free by searching for the article and clicking through to NYT from Google.
http://www.twitch.tv/p/thankyou
Granted, that article is old, but I think a pretty serious investment in physical infrastructure has been made by Justin.tv/Twitch. So I'm more willing to believe they're still leveraging some variation of this architecture rather than AWS.
[http://highscalability.com/blog/2010/3/16/justintvs-live-vid...]
None of the reporting outlets have any substantial details yet though.
Does anyone have statistics on whether FireTV is doing better with gaming that OUYA? Does anyone actually use the gaming features?
For now, Amazon is selling physical copies, but seems reasonable to reuse their content delivery infrastructure for game downloads in the future.
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Downloads/
Amazon or Google will piss off or drive away the Twitch user base. The users will all move to Hitbox.tv or any number of new sites that will pop up. It's easy to do live streaming, it's just expensive. This acquisition will bring funding and Yahoo will buy the next popular live streaming site.
There is already a lot of money in esports, so I'll go out on a limb here, and say that it's only a matter of time before it becomes mainstream.
But just watching someone else play Fallout 3? Talk about a lack of immersion. I don't get it...
I think it's just like any physical sport - having knowledge about a game and watching someone skilled play is interesting. People watch to learn and get better at something they find interesting. That said, watching someone play Fallout definitely isn't what gamers think of when you mention "eSports" - generally eSports refers to some level of competition, which is why real time strategy games and first person shooters are so popular - both require a lot of skill and knowledge of the game to be good at.
Getting back to the "Official Video Game Olympics" - there are actually some pretty serious competitions out there. Certain game developers have been known to self-host their own tournaments for millions of dollars in prizes (League of Legends and Call of Duty being two examples). There's also plenty of companies making a profitable business out of running these tournaments: ESL in Europe and Major League Gaming in the US being two of the bigger names out there right now. So in fact, the competition and prizes are very real, so anyone interested in a game may be interested in seeing who's going to win $1,000,000.
It's nice that I don't have to invest the time it takes to get up to speed to know what's going on if the commentary's good -- and it's a solid, mindless contrast to TV for me (which has been phenomenally engaging lately. it's impossible to read emails and watch house of cards, which isn't true for game streaming :D)
1. People like to see someone of a very high level play a game that they too play.
2. You often get to see someone playing a game that you never heard about. For instance: The recent speed running marathon streams have showed a lot of obscure and old games.
3. And most important: People are entertained by the commentary from the streamer.
If you just run a game with no commentary you will be hard pressed to get any viewers. It is more that with the younger generation games have become a huge part of culture and to see someone playing games you play as well and chatting give the viewer a social experience. There is chat too and the streamers often address people in chat. If you look at the most popular personalities on YouTube many of them are gaming related. People spend a lot of time playing today's very immersive, social, and large scale games so it follows that they can be entertained by personalities involved with them.
I'll often leave a stream on in the background at work, or watch someone playing while I'm rocking my son to sleep.
With video games its a bit similar. If you played the game or something similar before you can appreciate whats going on but otherwise you will be completely lost and everything feels pointless.
Competitive game players watch replays and streams to increase their level of play in e.g. RTSs, etc.
When players do watch a streamer play a single player game, it's usually because the game has recently been released, and they want to make an opinion on whether or not they should buy it. Or because they enjoy the streamer's personality and commentary. They're not watching Fallout 3, they're watching TotalBiscuit play Fallout 3.
It's not very fun watching someone play Fallout, but it's entertaining watching someone play Fallout role-playing as a homicidal maniac that uses nothing but his bare fists. The sheer difficulty is impressive, and if coupled with a talent for presentation/humor it can be a pretty fun time.
I don't really get it, but she came up with the idea and started doing it by herself. There must be some sort of attraction to this thing.
1. Sometimes you just want to veg out and watch something, not be an active participant. You can enjoy the game without putting in any effort.
2. There's a community aspect to it. In a single-player game like Fallout you get to see someone else enjoying and talking about what you enjoy, and you can interact with others who share the same interests.
3. Many of the people who stream are really good players. Almost no one reaches that level of play so for most people watching a streamer is the only way to experience it. They can also offer insights and help make you a better player.
It is kind of weird and not traditional... but it does make sense to a young'n like me.
I never understood how people could watch soccer/football and not get bored to death until the rise of esports. Now I often watch the league games for my favorite team and most of the world championship games.
What I find astonishing are Youtube "clip shows" on cable channels. These are "shows" where the hosts screen videos they found on Youtube and talk about them or rip them apart. I don['t get the appeal but apparently they fill the air time. Something which was a curated set of videos about a particular video game might actually have appeal to me, either from a shopping (I wonder if I would like it) to a mastery (I wonder what other people do at that stage) kind of thing. Not saying it would make money but I would be tempted to watch it. Some of the Eve commentary would make for an excellent show as well.
[1] - Blizzard however is doing what they can to make it unnecessary much to the demise of the 'fun' aspect.
Think of it this way: imagine if Kasparov and Fisher live streamed all of their chess practice, informal competition, and formal competition. Odds are chess fans would line up to watch.
It's just like that, but with strategic online games instead of strategic board games.
Also, some of the streamers are practically comedians, so they sometimes watch for general comedy and enjoyment as well. Or a mix.
Other way around, I think. Competitive video games ought to be called "competitive games," like chess. The whole "e-sport" label is stupid: "sport" has always meant a primarily physical competition, and competitive games of the sitting-down type--chess, checkers, Go, Scrabble, etc.--have been their own thing, with leagues and tournaments and titles, for decades or centuries before video games came around. Video games are more dependent on quick thinking and reflexes, but they're still primarily mental competition--see also speed chess, etc.
But competitive video gamers are too full of themselves to be happy rubbing shoulders with something as unhip as chess. They insist that they deserve the same (arguably equally undeserved) acclaim and money and fandom as sports, so they keep pushing the "e-sports" label and all the associated silly trappings and theatrics. After two decades of fruitless flailing, it seems like it might finally be about to stick, more's the pity.
When they play Minecraft, they make up their own commentary and they're dying to have their own show.
http://www.twitch.tv/giantwaffle is primarily a minecraft streamer, and he generally doesnt curse and explains what hes doing. Beware, he does do nightstreams with Lirik, including cussing. He'll announce these, though.
Single player / non-competitive games (such as your example, Fallout 3) are indeed much less exciting and get less viewers. There are also streamers that aren't very good at playing anything, but they're entertaining in one way or another and have built up a following that just watched them play whatever.
A stadium. For video games.
The barrier to entry is just so much lower for video games when compared to professional sports - nearly anyone can play and get good enough to compete against the pros without even leaving their house. Personally I prefer "real" sports over their virtual counterparts, but millions of people disagree with me - and that number will only continue to grow. I think eSports are going to grow dramatically over the next 5 years.
That's the only point. Not much of one.
The internet is a pretty big stadium.
NFL like status is not attainable so lets not say that this is the business plan. Yes the users can move somewhere else, but for gaming twitch is the de facto site for streaming right now. There has been talk of switching sites whenever some streamers get aggravated but it would have to be a huge failure to have people switch en masse.
It is also not easy to do live streaming. It uses massive amounts of bandwidth, and you have to keep this going live to people all over the world. Twitch is the YouTube of video game streaming at the moment and it would be hard to unseat them.
Keep in mind these are concurrent video viewers over the course of many hours. If you take video plays like Youtube does it measures in the many millions for a tournament like EVO.
I don't care about a random keyboard or video card advertisement. But what keyboard or video card your favorite streamer is using seem like a far more valuable ad to pursue. The NFL and others have a lot of branding. And merchandising among teams. YouTube can't get people to buy shirts or random things of random funny fading videos. But I think it'd be a lot more likely for many to buy something relateded to longer term Fandom
Look at Audible - they still have their own crufty website (which uses the same credentials as your Amazon site, sure) and discovery and reviews are less usable there than on Amazon.com.
Also see Goodreads, DPR and IMDB - all places where things have essentially gone on "as before".
Amazon could clone Twitch fairly easily (bandwidth is the limiting factor and Amazon happens to have gobs of it), but they still bought the Twitch brand. It would be a ridiculous waste to throw that in the trash.
Audiobooks (both Audible and physical CDs) are listed side-by-side other types of book media on Amazon.com. To pick a random example, if you look up Steel World by BV Larson: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FCXPC94/ - you'll see the paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible audio edition, and sometimes others.
Some titles have "Whispersync for Voice", which I think is an impressive type of integration. With those titles, you can sync your progress between the Audible and Kindle formats, so that you don't lose progress when switching from reading to listening. Additionally, when you own one format, the price of the other format drops substantially (if I recall, usually to a few dollars). I count that as a deep and sophisticated type of integration between the Kindle store and Audible.
Whether I visit the Amazon.com site or Audible depends on my motivation. If I want to find a good book, and I'm willing to either read or listen, then I'll hit Amazon. If I'm looking specifically for an audiobook, I'll hit Audible. Also, I think the Audible site might have been redone since you've last seen it. The home page doesn't look like what was around before the acquisition. I see a modern, Amazon-style product grid on audible.com when logged in. It's also integrating content from Amazon such as "Based on your Amazon and Kindle book purchases, we think you'll enjoy...". The Audible site to me looks like a curated window into Amazon.com now.
I'm on Twitch.tv more than ABC, NBC, CBS, etc for 8 months out of the year (football season excepted).
And I'm definitely not the only person who is like this.
No kids are leaving Twitch as long as it doesn't get rebranded. Amazon just needs to run it as a separate product.
You may be right, but you may be wrong. Twitch is in a similar sort of space as sports - which are the best kind of content generators (and content is king). Piracy is largely side-stepped because value is highest when it is LIVE. New content is always created by incumbents and new challengers, and there is tons of opportunity for marketing.
I don't know what the future holds, but E-Sports are here to stay. It'll only get bigger.
>Twitch obviously can't believe it's very close to reaching NFL-like status either or it wouldn't sell for a mere billion and change.
Why not? Superbowl has 100 million viewers. 200 million viewers for the total NFL season. I don't think those numbers are that impressive, when Facebook gets 800 million active users per day, on 1.3 billion active accounts and Youtube gets 4 billion views per day. In fact, NFL is pretty much done. There is only so much money you can squeeze out of North America, and nobody else cares about it.
>The users will all move to Hitbox.tv or any number of new sites that will pop up. It's easy to do live streaming, it's just expensive.
It's easy to do Youtube. It's easy to do Facebook. It's easy to do Instagram. It's easy to do WhatsApp. Now go do it and see how well you do.
I mean we already see the start of it with YouTube broadcasting Coachella, etc. More recently, Twitch has been used to stream gaming-related real life stuff, like the Dota 2 International 4 after-party DJ set. Conversely, the big media conglomorates are still wrestling with how to deliver content online and most just mirror your cable subscription to your device, rather than offer IP-exclusive methods of delivery.
I don't think Amazon is the best fit for Twitch - I personally would've preferred some company who is in the entertainment industry and more willing to start breaching into broadcasting live concerts, sport, big events, etc. on it. Valve, for example, already uses Twitch pretty heavily during their events and has shown interest to move outside of gaming (they sell non-gaming software via Steam) but they're probably also not mature enough to really start becoming a fully-fledged media company either. I don't really know of one company who is ideal in that space.
That said, I don't think Amazon is the worst either. It'll be intersting to see how they take it.
The entertainment industry is notoriously short-sighted and generally parasitic when it comes to technology. It's also an industry that is extremely image conscious. Having uncontrolled/unedited content that runs counter to their image is anathema. If any game publisher or old guard broadcasting company had gotten its hands on Twitch, I strongly believe it wouldn't have gone well.
Plus a lot of the people who are streaming there do links back to Amazon, Newegg, and similar, for the gear they use or want. I am curious if Amazon will put pressure on the streamers to limit links to non Amazon sites for goods.
Plus with private streams its entirely possible they may leverage it into a webex type business.
Worth pointing out that's a lot of money -- if it becomes a large cultural force, they'll still get credit, if there's more money on the table... some people don't care about the difference in numbers that huge. So this takes a lot of variability off the table at a fairly marginal cost (no second giant yacht, etc).
http://www.amazon.com/Fire-TV-streaming-media-player/dp/B00C...
Note what Amazon Prime Streaming works on. Then go here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/video/ontv/devices
Note that aside from Apple's devices, Amazon Prime video works only on Amazon's own mobile hardware.
Is this why they're buying Twitch? To make it another "Amazon Exclusive" for Fire devices? Frankly that would explain a lot. If they can lock the content down it will force people into their ecosystem if they want mobile access.
If Amazon wanted a similar service to make exclusive to the Kindle ecosystem, it would make much more sense to grow one themselves with deep integration into the kindle line of products. They've done this with a lot of other products and services, and certainly have the capability.
With Twitch, it would seem to make more sense for them to continue to seek partnerships with gaming platforms so that the Twitch.tv brand is increasingly ubiquitous in gaming, and then use that as a relatively extrinsic source of growth.
I could see them locking out strategic players (hint: Google), and making certain events or content exclusive to the Kindle ecosystem, but locking everything down to Kindle doesn't strike me as a viable move.
Desktops, laptops, iPhone, iPad, iPod, TVs, Roku, PS3, PS4, XBox 360, XBox One, Wii, Wii U, Blu-ray players
There was a two year period of time after the dotcom crash was over where they were beaten on pretty heavily about the lack of profitability.
It really doesn't matter if investors beat the drums frankly. Bezos controls enough of Amazon's stock - roughly three times the next largest investor - it would be difficult to spar with him, short of the stock truly plunging (something like a 75% drop from here might do it). The Bezos family controls roughly as much stock as the next five largest owners combined.
The correct answer is: so long as Amazon's sales continue to grow at ... 15% to 25% per year, and the losses do not become life threatening again, the drums will never get loud enough to disrupt what Bezos wants to do.
I expect with a $100b +/- market cap, Amazon can continue to function without much external concern for quite some time. $100b or so mostly keeps them out of range of someone trying to buy them, and will enable continued acquisitions as needed, while not bashing shareholders too much on the downside such that everyone turns against Bezos. I see no reason they can't maintain that perpetually with zero profits, if sales continue to grow, given the sales scale they're likely to reach in the next decade. They will be given a serious sales multiple so long as sales keep growing relatively quickly. Investors will focus on that and be placated by the kool-aid. When sales growth stops, investors will shift to demanding profits and dividends.
There would have to be some catastrophic setbacks, big losses, and a pause in sales growth, to force Bezos into changing his approach. I suspect at that point he would step aside and become just chairman.
However, keep in mind, Amazon would love to have a cash cow. They'd love nothing more than to print up $4 billion per year in profit from the fire phone, or from their new advertising initiative. So they can show profits, boom the stock, and perpetually run a tight margin business everywhere else.
In my opinion the answer to this question is whichever comes first of Jeff Bezos dying, amazon being the largest company in the world or amazon imploding and going broke.
Imagine what our reaction will be if someone posts a link to their own blog which doesn't allow visitor to read the content without paying $1. Even if they have a work-around like you can inspect element and hide the paywall popup.
The whole point of this site is so I don't have to search, I just have to come here.
For the majority of readers here there is no news at the end of that link, just and advert for the WSJ's paywalled services. It's effectively spam for most of us.
This Google search link should do the trick.
Edit: this is only somewhat reliable...YMMV.
https://www.google.com/#q=site%3Awsj.com+%22Amazon+to+Buy+Vi...
The main issue with it is that it doesn't bode well with the requirement for original reporting. In this case, there are 4 sources of which I'm aware (The Information, WSJ, Bloomberg and Recode) who reported on this, and all of them were original reports. Even if The Information was first to press, they all conducted their reporting indepedently and the fact that four sources have the same information is very relevant. By linking to only one original report, you're depriving the average HN reader of knowledge of this journalistic consensus.
Even if the link had to be to an original report, it would make more sense to link to The Information, which is also paywalled, but was first to press. But really, I'd prefer the top HN link to be to a site like Ars Technica, which diligently compiled all the different reports.
I have since found other TV/movie streaming sites, but none are as mature or reliable as JTV was.
You may as well complain "I'm upset that the city bulldozed all of those crack houses; they were a really great place to buy crack."
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/25/amazon-will-buy-twitch-for-...
http://blog.twitch.tv/2014/08/a-letter-from-the-ceo-august-2...
http://www.bvp.com/blog/twitch-time-wild-ride-start-finish