Samuel Gibbs 

Twitch’s CEO stays defiant despite Amazon takeover of company

Emmet Shear insists gamers’ live streaming site won’t start to integrate Amazon’s shopping features after the acquisition, but says it’s all about advertising. By Samuel Gibbs
  
  

Twitch logo
Twitch’s chief executive said there would be no direct integration with Amazon. Photograph: Rex

Twitch’s co-founder Emmett Shear has defended the company in the wake of its acquisition by Amazon, saying that he will refuse to let the live streaming video site for gamers be turned into a shop front.

Shear said that Twitch would remain in its current state, with links to purchase games on Amazon, but that there would be no direct integration with Amazon and its shopping cart and that there had been no discussion of data sharing between the two companies.

“Our entire website, in some ways, is a native advertising unit for videogames,” Shear said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. “If you change that into a storefront, you destroy a lot of what’s great about Twitch.”

“I do think we’ll be doing a lot more to aid our partners if they want to do that [sell games], but there’s a difference between that and serving as a storefront for Amazon,” he said.

Twitch is currently working to help drive video viewers to buy links for the games they’re watching others play, but how much interference Amazon is planning with the site is unknown, as is where it fits within Amazon’s retail and content strategy.

Amazon will be looking for a return on its $1bn purchase, which some have speculated will involve advertising revenue. Jeff Bezos has driven Amazon into new markets beyond standard online retail, including apps and games through its App Store and video on-demand through its Amazon Prime Video service, where Twitch could fit in.

Twitch: what is it, and why has Google bought it for $1bn?

 

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