The news just came down that Amazon.com, Inc. will be buying Twitch for $970 million. This news comes right after rumors of a one billion dollar deal from Google to buy the video game live streaming website. Google’s offer led to a great deal of ruffled feathers and speculation about the future.

Live stream viewers everywhere may be wondering what it would have meant for Twitch if Google did buy the website; but how does Amazon compare to the social media power of Google and what could the e-retailer and book seller company have planned?

Google would have meant more social media

Google has a long history of mixing social data and analytics with advertising, and having already overhauled YouTube, would probably redirect those resources over livestreaming. By combining machine learning and social advertising, Google’s approach to Twitch would likely combine social media’s deep well of data bout customers to produce better targeted advertisements.

This year, Google acquired mDialog, a Canadian online advertising service, for integration with DoubleClick, as well as Adometry, a service that provides advertisement analytics to determine customer conversion behavior. In 2011, Google grabbed SocialGrapple, social media analytics to be combined with Google+. Between DoubleClick and Adsense, Google would have every reason to combine Google+, search, Gmail and analytics with watcher behavior and Twitch.

The result would most likely be an entirely new ecosystem for socially interactive advertising with audiences engaged in watching live streams.

When it was originally rumored that Google would buy Twitch, people immediately looked to the acquisition of YouTube in 2006 as a historical guideline.

The transition from old YouTube to Google YouTube was felt by many as the company had been on a crusade to get its Google+ social media platform pushed to as many people as possible. Google Plus integration with YouTube was best described as fraught with problems. As columnist Violet Blue said, of Google’s 2013 initiative to overhaul YouTube with Google+, “Google’s move to force Plus onto YouTube has outraged the YouTube community – and beyond.”

Now the integration woes have largely calmed and the new comment system is the status quo. When commenting on a YouTube video, the comment itself can be shared on Google Plus and YouTube channels themselves have Google+ pages.

The biggest trick Google would have to pull with Twitch would be how to make it play nice with Google Hangouts. The search giant already has a live streaming capability via both YouTube and Hangouts and adding Twitch could have been yet another streaming outlet. In 2011, Google worked to better absorb YouTube into Hangouts (to limited interconnectivity.)

Adding Twitch to that mix would most likely have meant that YouTube, Google+, and Google Hangouts would become much better buddies. Twitch streamers would likely be logging into their accounts via the Google single sign-on, had their own Google Plus pages generated, YouTube channels connected.

Google’s long term history of new media acquired has been to integrate it with every other social media part of Google.

Amazon could mean a shift for mobile and consumers

Amazon at its core has been a media company. Even dabbling with PaaS and cloud services, much of Amazon’s acquisitions have focused on expanding a content empire. However, that focus on content is not just about the content itself but content delivery as well. With the Kindle Fire and an app marketplace, Amazon has been looking to mobile and electronic content for many years.

As an e-retailer, Amazon already sells video games but the company has slowly over the years been cozying up to gaming. Earlier this year, the company acquired game developer Double Helix, the developer of popular fighting game Killer Instinct. And games were a big part of Amazon’s announcement of the Fire TV platform—not to mention a Twitch app for the set-top box launched in May.

This year, Amazon shifted its attention to mobile development and live streaming is a category rife to be streamed to mobile devices. Services such as AWS can be used to do a lot of the heavy lifting in the cloud, such as transcoding streamed video to be displayed across different devices and spreading out the load to reduce lag between viewers watching from across the globe. Add in the Kindle Fire HD and the Fire Phone (however lackluster the reception) and there’s a recipe for gamers catching up with their favorite streamers on the commute to and from work.

Monetizing Twitch data

Likelihood is that Twitch is a quick and easy monetization route for Amazon. Whenever a gamer streams a game on Twitch, the name of the game is added to the metadata—people already go to YouTube and Twitch to determine if they want to play a game and if after watching someone else play want to purchase it, Amazon would be right there offering to sell it to them.

Furthermore, all of this data flowing in would be useful not just for Amazon—to determine and watch trends in who is playing what games on Twitch, but also who is watching what games. This data could quickly give Amazon an edge in seeing what sort of watching behaviors lead to what types of purchases. Also, collecting this kind of data could lead to relationships between Amazon and video game publishers who already collect lots of data on games in order to court the audiences they sell to.

The 2010s have been an era of downloadable digital games and especially DLC. Many games from a multitude of IPs are beginning to court microtransactions, especially the free-to-play market, and games such as Riot Game’s League of Legends has been rewarded greatly from competitions being watched on Twitch. This is the realm of eSports.

Unlike traditional spots, eSports games pander to fans by allowing them to play the game celebrities engage in and offer a $1 here and $5 there to allow people to change their look or help boost their progression in games. These celebrities bring a lot of viewers to Twitch and provide a great deal of advertising revenue; but for the underlying games the Twitch sessions and the celebrities also pull in much needed revenue.

eSports league gaming is becoming a massive spectator sport and is centered largely around Twitch. As a spectator sport it has drawn viewership in excess of 70 million and brought in $624 million for Riot Games in 2013 and DOTA 2 earned around $80 million. According to a report in Superdata Research, this trend has only been increasing yearly. Not only do eSports viewers watch a lot, they watch often, making an average of 19 times a month for over two hours at a time.

Amazon already has on hand the infrastructure to help Twitch handle the future of eSports and livestreaming with the capabilities behind AWS. The company also has relationships with numerous video game developers and publishers that could lead to lucrative sponsorships and advertisement campaigns directed at gamers. And, just to open up a wider audience, Amazon’s moves into the mobile arena, especially where video is concerned, could lead to even further viewership.

photo credit: Mustafa Sayed via photopin cc and second photo: Danny Choo via photopin cc