Google's latest billion-dollar acquisition is reportedly Twitch, a game service that has become one of the largest live-streaming platforms on the Web, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Twitch Interactive, Inc., will become part of Google's YouTube unit in an effort to boost YouTube's live stream audience. San Francisco-based Twitch, for which Google is believed to have paid $1 billion, is where gaming enthusiasts can watch other people play video games.
"The way Twitch has built and executed this service has been flawless," said Dan Rayburn, executive vice president of StreamingMedia.com, as quoted by the L.A. Times. "This is going to let them take the next step forward."
YouTube has attempted to build its own live stream efforts but has been unsuccessful. Bringing on Twitch should help the video platform introduce live streams in other entertainment categories.
Launching three years ago, Twitch has grown from 3.2 million unique viewers each month to 45 million. Fans come to watch the more than 1 million gamers who broadcast their video game channels on the service.
The average Twitch viewer watches 106 minutes of the platform's video game live streams daily, while around 58 percent of viewers spend 20-plus hours a week watching Twitch videos, according to company data cited by the L.A. Times.
The gaming community has used Twitch for efforts like "Twitch Plays Pokémon," an experiment where more than a million gamers worked to control the game as a group.
The game's channel on Twitch had more than 36 million views by around nine million people, peaking at 121,000 viewers at the same time.
Guiding the main character, Red, the players entered more than 122 million commands and put in more than a billion minutes of viewing time, according to statistics released by Twitch.
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