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How much of a bargain does the original Google acquisition of YouTube, for $1.65 billion, seem today? Less than one tenth of what Facebook are paying for WhatsApp!
YouTube wasn't super huge when Google bought them though, I'd suspect twitch has bigger brand recognition now than YouTube had then.
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YouTube wasn't super huge when Google bought them though, I'd suspect twitch has bigger brand recognition now than YouTube had then.
YouTube was THE online video site back then. Twitch is pretty much unheard of these days by the general public other than people following the PC gaming scene.
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Presently, yes. However, it does not have the same long-term potential as Twitch. Snapchat is ephemeral, a trend.
Here's the value of Snapchat: Social interaction without the paper trail.
For years people have been talking about the experience of today's youth who will, by the time they are 20, have thousands of old posts and tweets and blogs and instagrams. How many people have lamented the way these might come back to haunt you 10, 15 years later? It's a warning I gave my (much younger) sister when she got on Facebook at age 13.
Snapchat solves that. Snaps can be saved, sure, but you won't leave the paper trail you do on Facebook.
I personally doubt Snapchat will be a future blue chip on its own. But if they hit a hundred million users... well, we're living in a WhatsApp world. Based on the latest numbers I've seen, I'd guess they're about half way there. If growth is continuing in 2014 the way it was in 2013, they could see 100+ MM in a year.
It's worth noting that Twitch partially became popular because it wasn't YouTube , and gamers could stream without content restrictions (e.g. copyright and region) Miraculously, this could end up making YouTube comments even worse .
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Well, looks like it's time to start another competitor :)
On a back of the napkin calculation, how much outgoing throughput would one need to be able to stream to ten clients directly on say 720p (~30 frames per second)? I was wondering if it would be possible to create a set up where people can stream from home without any third party in between. Is that even possible for larger audiences?
Or some sort of peer-to-peer Popcorn time style (Bittorrent Live?[1]) that can distribute the load across all viewers.
Hmm... "Twitch-Time" may be an interesting way to resurrect that service.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/15/5414430/bittorrent-live-mo...
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Ha. Your naiveté is cute. This deal is all about buying out the competition. It's not about streaming. Youtube could have streaming if they wanted to, without the 1B.
Exactly. It's about owning the market and removing a potential competitor who saps money from YouTube. It's a smart move for Google.
It's interesting that YouTube is acquiring Twitch and not Google. I realize that's sort of a smallish point, but it's interesting how that might be announced officially. Google obviously owns YouTube, but in terms of branding and identity and control, it's interesting.
Congrats to Justin and everyone involved in Twitch! As a side note: most of my friends are LoL fans, and I seriously believe professional gaming will be one of the major professional sports in the next few years, perhaps on the level of Hockey. They're super normal, social, extroverted people - yet they'll interrupt a trip to make us watch a LoL match on Twitch. They all came of it independently too. I really believe…
As a user of Twitch, I do not want this to happen. As a person with common sense, if I had an acquisition offer for $1 billion on the table, I'd sell out so freaking fast.
It's worth noting that Twitch partially became popular because it wasn't YouTube , and gamers could stream without content restrictions (e.g. copyright and region) Miraculously, this could end up making YouTube comments even worse .
I think it's important to take notice that Twitch's recent problems (the buffering problem, chat problems, the delay in general) are problems with their ability to cater to the big tournaments which causes me to really not be all that surprised if this turns out to be true. The ways they've handled the tournaments have really disillusioned many streamers. I don't know if there's any better way for them to have dealt…