YouTube Speculated to Purchase Game Stream Site Twitch.tv for $1 Billion

It’s still not confirmed, but this is one acquisition that should surprise no one: YouTube has picked up Twitch.tv for $1 billion. Actually, one thing is a little surprising about this, and that’s the going price. Twitch.tv, since its launching, has become the de facto place for those who want to stream their gameplay to the world. Sure, there are others out there, but Twitch.tv has the benefit of being supported on many devices, including the consoles, so its presence is enormous.

It’s funny, then, that for a site with such reach and advertising potential, it gets acquired for a mere $1 billion, when earlier this year, Facebook acquired WhatsApp, a company with very little advertising potential, for $19 billion. Of course, there’s more to the WhatsApp deal than just advertising, such as advertising mining, but even so, the difference is incredible.

Nonetheless, YouTube is the world’s largest video-on-demand service, and now, it’s going to be the world’s biggest game-streamer service. That’s some incredible market power, and another thing on the pile of ways Google is integrated into our lives. I use Gmail. I use an Android phone. I watch videos on YouTube, and just the other day I purchased an album on Google Play. By now, I’m sure Google knows how many times I breathe each minute while jotting away on stories I write about the company.

As you might imagine, fans of Twitch.tv are not that happy about this acquisition. The service has done just fine (for the most part) up to this point without Google’s intervention, and now, who knows where things will go. The big thing we can hope for is that Twitch’s video player doesn’t suddenly become replaced by YouTube’s, which many consider to be unreliable.

It’s common for an acquisition to cause an outpouring of complaint from fans of the swallowed-up service, so we’ll have to wait and see just how this affects Twitch, if at all. If anything, it could bolster the competition, which is hardly a bad thing.