Amazon Plays the Long Game with Acquisition of Twitch.tv

Amazon's acquisition of Twitch.tv is an immediate move in executing on their "all screen" strategy and a long-term play for the next generation of users, says The New York Times.

Demographically, it’s a bit of a leap — Amazon’s user base looks more like me than the young people on Twitch, but then, that’s sort of the point. You have to build your next cohort of customers.And after years of contenting itself as the biggest online retailer of hard goods, Amazon has made its media ambitions clear — part of its future lies in occupying screens of all sorts.

Perhaps more importantly, Twitch works for both users and Amazon because they have gotten the technology right:

The economics of Twitch are compelling partly because it supplies its own content and audience, comparable to an oven that produces its own food. But it wouldn’t be streaming all that content to giant audiences if it didn’t get the technology right. People who marvel at the growth of Netflix would do well to remember that it cracked the code on the technology side of streaming before it ever competed for Emmys. Netflix caught on because the service worked.

Dent the Future congratulates 2014 speaker Emmett Shear on the sale of Twitch.tv to Amazon.Dent The Future is coming up March 22-25, 2015. Register here.