Amazon acquires Twitch for $970 million

Amazon has acquired popular video games live stream service Twitch for $970 million, the company announced.

The June 2011-launched service saw more than 55 million unique visitors in July and over 15 billion minutes of content produced by more than one million broadcasters.

“Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon and Twitch has built a platform that brings together tens of millions of people who watch billions of minutes of games each month – from The International, to breaking the world record for Mario, to gaming conferences like E3. And, amazingly, Twitch is only three years old,” said Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. “Like Twitch, we obsess over customers and like to think differently, and we look forward to learning from them and helping them move even faster to build new services for the gaming community.”

Twitch CEO Emmett Shear added,“Amazon and Twitch optimize for our customers first and are both believers in the future of gaming. Being part of Amazon will let us do even more for our community. We will be able to create tools and services faster than we could have independently. This change will mean great things for our community, and will let us bring Twitch to even more people around the world.”

The acquisition, which will see Amazon acquire all of the outstanding shares of Twitch, is expected to close in the second half of 2014.