Amazon will lay off several hundred employees in its streaming and studio divisions as well as subsidiary Twitch in order to reduce costs amid the latest in a wave of video industry contraction.

Twitch, the video live-streaming company acquired by Amazon in 2014 will cut just over 500 roles, or 35% of its workforce, according to a blog post by Twitch CEO Dan Clancy. Prime Video and MGM Studios will eliminate “hundreds” of jobs, according to an email sent by management to employees on Wednesday morning.

“Despite these efforts, it has become clear that our organization is still meaningfully larger than it needs to be given the size of our business,” Clancy said. “[The] decision, while incredibly difficult and painful, is necessary to ensure that we can continue to serve our streamers sustainably without impacting their ability to support their careers on Twitch.”

Added Mike Hopkins, senior VP of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studio, in his separate company email address: “We’ve identified opportunities to reduce or discontinue investments in certain areas while increasing our investment and focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact ... Our prioritization of initiatives that we know will move the needle, along with our continued investments in programming, marketing and product, positions our business for an even stronger future.”

Amazon said that the layoffs will be completed by the end of the week.

The cuts come just weeks before Amazon is set to roll out a new ads initiative for subscription-based Amazon Prime Video service, requiring users to pay an extra $3 per month to avoid them. 

These ads could boost annual revenue by as much as $5 billion, according to a Bank of America Analysis. Ads on Amazon’s streaming service will start appearing in North America on Jan. 29 and internationally on Feb. 5.

Amazon has spent recent years aggressively pursuing the growth of its media division, including the $8.45 billion acquisition for MGM in 2021 and over $1 billion in payouts to individual content creators by subsidiary Twitch last year. Later, it was revealed that Amazon had grossly overvalued MGM's content library, which was re-assessing it at $3.4 billion, according to a March 2022 10Q filing.

Amazon has ramped up its streaming offerings as part of its Prime package in recent years, which charges for expedited shipping and other perks.

But last year, Twitch also laid off 400 people as part of overall Amazon cuts. And in December, announced it would shut down its service in South Korea because of “prohibitively expensive” costs.

Amazon last year cut more than 27,000 jobs, part of a record-breaking wave of U.S. tech layoffs that followed industry over-expansion during the pandemic.

In total, the media industry shed over 21,000 jobs last year, the highest total for the sector since 2020, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

Amazon’s shares were up 1.6% in afternoon trading. Twitch has also seen recent viewership increases. 

“While the Twitch business remains strong, for some time now the organization has been sized based upon where we optimistically expect our business to be in three or more years, not where we’re at today,” explained Clancy in his statement. “As with many other companies in the tech space, we are now sizing our organization based upon the current scale of our business and conservative predictions of how we expect to grow in the future.”

Stephen Boss, who parlayed an appearance on So You Think You Can Dance to a multihyphenate role as deejay, guest host and, eventually, executive producer on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, died December 13 at 40. The death was ruled a suicide.

Boss was known as tWitch.

He was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1982, and got his nickname as a child because he could not sit still. He joined So You Think You Can Dance in 2008, and finished the season as the runner-up. He performed a hip-hop duet with DeGeneres, and spent nearly a decade on the daytime show. DeGeneres referred to Boss as “my sidekick.”

The Ellen DeGeneres Show ended earlier this year.

Boss was the announcer on the DeGeneres game show Ellen’s Game of Games. He was a judge on So You Think You Can Dance and hosted The Real Dirty Dancing on Fox earlier this year.

He married Allison Holker, whom he met when she was a contestant on So You Think You Can Dance.

Boss’s film work includes Magic Mike XXL and movies in the Step Up franchise.

Boss died in a Los Angeles motel room. ■

Amazon Ads said it would provide advertisers with ways to measure the incremental reach it generates via streaming television.

At its unBoxed conference in New York Wednesday, the giant online retailer said Amazon Streaming TV reaches an unduplicated potential monthly U.S. audience of more than 135 million, including Freevee and Twitch.

Its new household reach report is generated post-campaign and shows advertisers how many people saw video ads beyond those who viewed them on linear TV.

Amazon said it assembles the report by combining first- and third-party signals, augmented by machine learning-based projections.

The big-tech firm recently announced it was working with Nielsen to measure Thursday Night Football audiences on Amazon Prime Video for advertisers.

Amazon also said that more than 25 of its streaming series are participating in its Virtual Product Placement program. 

The shows include Sprung; Cosmic Love; Reacher; Love Accidentally; Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan; Bosch: Legacy; Making the Cut and Leverage: Redemption. 

Virtual product placement helps brands show up within streaming TV content and reach the right audiences while allowing Amazon content creators to focus on telling stories, the company said.

Another opportunity for advertisers is to use the Amazon Freevee welcome screen as a full-screen showcase for the brands. In the beta version of the product, brands get seven seconds of exposure when consumers launch the Freevee app on Fire TV.

Fire TV customers will also have access to the IMDb What to Watch app, which provides U.S. users with a series of interactive mini-games and quizzes designed to help fan decide what to stream. The feature comes with in-app sponsorship opportunities. 

“Our video ad solutions work together and make it simpler for brands to reach relevant audiences at scale, so they can deliver their creative work alongside popular content, engage viewers with delightful experiences and measure and optimize their impact,” Amazon Ads VP of U.S. Sales Tanner Elton said. “We want to bring the power of video advertising to more brands, no matter their size or level of resources.” 

Amazon pointed to research from Wyzowl in which 73% of consumers said they prefer video ads to learn about products and services, and 88% said video ads have convinced them to buy. 

The U.S. is home to more than 225 million streaming-TV viewers with spending on digital video advertising expected to reach $76 billion in 2022, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

To help marketers choose video, Amazon has a creative services offering that helps advertisers discover, compare and directly book with trusted service providers for the creation of impactful Sponsored Brands, Streaming TV, and Sponsored Display videos, as well as other creative assets. Brands can search and filter services based on their requirements, browse reviews and samples and directly connect with providers for end-to-end creative delivery, all within the Amazon ads console, the company said. 

Creative services simplify the creative production process for advertisers and enables more multichannel or upper-funnel marketing. Amazon said the service is free to use and there are no minimum commitments required to book. All services ensure compliance with Amazon Ads policy. ▪️

Amazon has begun to restrict outside parties including advertisers and the ad tech companies who serve them from seeing IP addresses of users for its IMDb TV and Twitch streaming platforms, making it harder for them to target consumers and build profiles of them. 

According to Ad Age, Amazon has begun stripping out user IP addresses from data it shares with outside parties on free, ad-supported streaming service IMDb TV and live-streaming service Twitch. 

The move is similar to tactics employed by Apple, which has not only stopped sharing user internet protocol addresses, but also cookies and device IDs.

The changes make it difficult for advertisers and their vendors to know important things, like how many times an individual user has seen an ad. 

“It could have a pretty wide impact,” says Tal Chalozin, chief technology officer at Innovid, a digital video ad tech platform, speaking to Ad Age. “If you’re a marketer looking to engage frequency capping, then you don’t know anything about the home, so it’s harder to do that. All parties are not getting as good of a result as they wanted. Marketers would like to see the data; tech providers rely on it to sell products; for media companies, it makes it harder for them to do targeting, they can’t release the most relevant ads.”

Amazon, of course, owns its own ad network, where it still can control things like frequency capping (how many times a user sees an ad) using the IP addresses it controls. 

But Amazon insists the issue revolves around privacy. 

The company has had policies in place for years that restrict access to information like IP addresses. 

"Under our Appstore Advertising ID Policy, third-party apps that collect information about users’ behaviors in order to display interest-based ads must use the Amazon Advertising ID,” Amazon told Ad Age. “No other identifier or tracking method (e.g., Android ID or IP address) may be used. Customers can reset their Advertising ID or use the interest-based ads setting on their device to manage their advertising preferences.”

Amazon’s biggest and best-known video-streaming unit is Amazon Prime Video, which is roughly as old as the streaming version of Netflix. Amazon Prime Video actually launched back in 2006 as Amazon Unbox. Since then, Amazon Prime has undergone a string of makeovers worthy of a Hollywood starlet, including multiple name changes, technological shifts, and the 2011 acquisition of Love Film, a British service similar to Netflix. 

And, like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video is now available in roughly 200 countries, with the main exceptions being mainland China, North Korea, Iran and Syria. 

Also Read: Amazon Infiltrates Fire TV into Cable TV Market with NCTC Deal

Amazon Prime, a program that involves free shipping on select goods, has an estimated 126 million members, who also get access to Amazon Prime Video as part of their $119/year fee, though third-party research suggests only about half of those customers take advantage. Amazon Prime Video is also available a la carte, at $8.99 per month, or only 93 cents less than the pro-rated cost of the much broader Prime subscription. 

Amazon spends an estimated $6 billion a year in programming, largely through Amazon Studios, presided over by former NBC entertainment chief Jennifer Salke for the past two years. 

The studios have been productive under Salke, particularly in comedy, where The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Fleabag took turns the past two years winning the Emmy for Best Comedy Series, among many other awards.

Amazon also has invested heavily, both in production and marketing, in other originals, most notably for a spinoff series based on Lord of the Rings. For those rights, secured amid peak interest in HBO’s Game of Thrones, Amazon paid $250 million, and is spending a similar amount to produce the initial series episodes. 

Amazon Prime Video’s newest big bet is Hunters, a revisionist historical take on Nazi hunters in the United States in the 1970s. It stars Al Pacino and Logan Lerman, and has been heavily promoted during the 2020 Oscars telecast and many other places. Other recent high-profile Amazon Prime Video programs include anthology show Modern Love, inspired by the New York Times column; Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan featuring  John Krasinski; and British sci-fi adaptation The Feed, featuring David Thewlis. There’s also plenty of licensed content to fill out around the originals. 

The Sun Never Sets

But Amazon’s streaming-media reach hardly stops with Amazon Prime Video. 

Amazon Channels is an Amazon Prime Video add-on, giving customers easy subscription access to still more TV, from roughly 150 providers, including such traditional pay-TV powers as HBO,  Showtime, and Starz; basic-cable spinoffs such as BET+, Lifetime Movie Club, Noggin, and Hallmark; newer streamers such as CBS All Access, BritBox, and CuriosityStream; and specialty channels such as Upfaith & Family, and Yoga Anytime Channel. 

Amazon Channels has been a lucrative outlet, for both the networks and Amazon itself. In late 2018, BMO Capital Markets estimated that the Channels unit generated $1.7 billion that year, as much as 30 percent going to Amazon. More importantly, Amazon Channels was generating anywhere from 25% to 40% of the subscribers watching those participating networks, BMO estimated.    

But not everyone wants to build their own replacement cable bundle. For the audience segment that prefers their video content free and don’t mind ads, in early 2019, Amazon launched AVOD service Freedive, with content licensed from Warner Bros., Sony, and MGM, interspersed with ads. Less than six months later, Freedive rebranded to IMDb TV, which competes most closely with the Roku Channel and reinforces another big Amazon brand. 

Also Read: The Five Spot: Q&A with Mark Eamer, VP of IMDb TV

Amazon still has its transactional side, too, selling traditional DVDs, Blu-Ray discs and CDs for the antediluvian audiences who still like old-fashioned packaged media. Its e-commerce operations are also a major Electronic Sell-Through and rental outlet.

It’s also worth noting that Amazon’s online-media offerings extend well beyond video. 

There’s Twitch, the live streaming platform focused on live multiplayer videogaming, that Amazon purchased in 2014. Twitch’s technological knowhow might come in handy as Amazon gets into things like live sports broadcast licensing. In June, Amazon started staffing up its software engineering and product management ranks to begin offering live, linear streaming. 

The Amazon Prime empire also includes IMDb, the vast reference database of film, TV shows, and other media content.  Amazon Music provides subscription music streams on par with Spotify and Apple. Amazon Prime members get a subset of that music for free. And the company owns audible.com, the giant purveyor of audiobooks and premium podcasts.

These disparate Amazon Prime offerings don’t seem to fit together particularly well. In part, as one former Amazon executive told me recently, the company frequently experiments with formats and approaches in new sectors.

“They tend to do a lot of experiments and learn from them,” the executive said. “Even if they lose money, it’s okay. They then grow from the knowledge.”

Amazon Prime has already killed off some experiments, like Anime Strike, an anime-focused stand-alone network on Amazon Channels that required its own separate subscription. 

Anime Strike launched in 2017 and lasted barely a year before shutting down, its content now available partly on Prime Video and partly on indie anime service HIDIVE.

But one part of the Amazon Prime empire does knit together all its disparate media experiments: its burgeoning hardware offerings. They include Fire TV tablets, connected TV interfaces, streaming devices, and a proliferating universe of first- and third-party devices built around the Alexa digital assistant. 

With more than 40 million active users worldwide, Amazon Fire TV is the No. 1 OTT device ecosystem globally. It ranks only behind Roku in the U.S. 

To borrow a well-used phrase from another famous brand, the range of Amazon media offerings allows customers to have it their way, on any of hundreds of devices and through just about every business model out there. Amazon Prime’s vast reach and resources allow it to be everywhere, and to try everything., to see what works  for consumers. 

As with some other massive players in the online space (Apple, Disney, increasingly Comcast), Amazon Prime’s media offerings are a way to make money, sure, but more importantly, they’re a way to keep customers coming back for everything else the company has to offer. Don’t call their media ventures a loss leader; call them a profit pusher. 

Google’s YouTube Gaming unit escalated the talent war being waged among live-streaming powerhouses, announcing a deal with publishing giant Activision-Blizzard to exclusively stream events from three of the world’s most popular esports titles. 

The deal also makes Google “preferred parrtner” for all of Activision-Blizzard’s titles, providing game-hosting infrastructure to hundreds of millions of monthly users. 

The deal covers the new Call of Duty League, the three-year-old Overwatch League, Hearthstone Esports, “and more,” according to a release. Activision-Blizzard also owns such major game franchises as World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, and mobile title Candy Crush.

Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s global head of gaming and virtual reality, dropped an enthusiastic tweet announcing the deal, welcoming the three leagues to YouTube’s fold. “Let’s get this thing going with the inaugural season of the Call of Duty League kicking off today.”

The announcement came just hours before the first matches in Activision’s new Call of Duty League, which features teams based in 12 U.S. and European cities playing a competitive team version of what most years this century has been the world’s best-selling game.

More importantly, the deal comes amid an expensive talent war between YouTube Gaming, Facebook Gaming, Amazon’s Twitch and Microsoft’s Mixer. All four services mostly feature live-streaming personalities talking about and playing games while interacting in chat rooms with hundreds or even thousands of fans.

Twitch has been the overwhelming market leader with around three-fourths of viewership, but its hegemony is being challenged, first with a series of talent raids the past six months and now the Google-Activision deal. 

Mixer set off the talent war last summer when it enticed Ninja, perhaps the most prominent gaming personality, to jump fromTwitch for a reported two-year deal in the low eight figures. A series of other raids followed, coming so often that Twitch eventually began issuing news releases when talent didn’t jump to the competition. 

But the new deal promises to further shift the business, said Doron Nir, CEO of StreamElements, which provides a range of tools for streaming talent and companies. 

"A lot of the focus in the live-streaming wars has been on the individual content creators being signed, given that they make up the majority of the content in the space,” Nir said. “However, esports events are often responsible for the biggest audiences with the two most watched channels on Twitch in 2019 being Riot Games (the company behind League of Legends) and Overwatch League. This makes YouTube Gaming's (signing) announcement of three notable leagues a significant move in terms of building their content portfolio and showcasing their commitment to the market."  

Nir said the move may further amp up the battle for streaming rights to live esports events and tournaments from other publishers. 

“The fight for esports rights has been going on for some time and it will continue to grow as the industry has shown no signs of slowing down,” Nir said. “The appeal of esports is no different than that of traditional sports, so whether you are going after the rights for the NFL or Overwatch League, both are hot commodities consumed by millions of passionate viewers.”  

Such events have attracted broadcast-sized audiences, but are held infrequently enough that they comprise a smaller share of the overall live-streaming audience on Twitch and its competitors.   

Individual tournaments for titles such as Counter Strike: Global Offensive or Dota 2 represent probably the next big signing opportunities, likely to attract heavy bidding for their streaming rights.

The deal is also a win for Google’s cloud-computing unit, itself locked in rugged competition with Microsoft and Amazon’s AWS unit for primacy in that fast-growing tech sector. 

Indeed, the company’s own press release focused substantially on news that Google Cloud will be the “preferred partner” meeting Activision Blizzard’s prodigious requirements for game-hosting infrastructure. 

Activision-Blizzard said it has “hundreds of millions of monthly active users” of all its games. YouTube said it already has 200 million daily visitors watching its existing game-related content.  

“The company turned to Google Cloud because of its highly reliable global footprint, advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities, and commitment to open source, creating a platform for building future gaming innovations,” the  company said in a release.

Nir said the big cloud providers have been poaching from competitors frequently in recent months, a reflection of both the market’s size and its huge growth opportunities. 

“Since live-streaming is the next frontier for digital content creation, we expect to see all types of channels – such as those that focus on talk shows, role playing matches, and music – growing in influence and attracting bigger sponsors,” Nir said.  

The deal does not involve China, a major esports hotbed. China is also home base for Ten Cent, whose many game- and internet-related holdings include a 5% stake in Activision.

The National Basketball Association and USA Basketball Tuesday (Aug. 6) expanded its distribution relationship with Amazon-owned social media service Twitch by making it the exclusive live streaming partner of USA Basketball. 

The eight-year old Twitch platform -- primarily used by video game enthusiasts to chat and compete among themselves -- will exclusively stream 40 hours of USA Basketball content globally, including all USA Men’s National Team exhibition games leading up to the FIBA World Cup in China, which begins Aug. 31. The multi-year deal also calls for Twitch to offer select USA Women’s National Team games and other USA Basketball events, according to the league. 

In addition, Twitch will exclusively stream 150 hours of Jr. NBA Global Championship games, adding to the service’s NBA portfolio of G-League games and NBA 2K League games.

I spoke to NBA Senior Vice President, Global Media Distribution and Business Affairs David Denenberg about the league’s continued relationship with the youth-targeted Twitch platform.

Why did the league feel Twitch was the best platform to exclusively stream USA Basketball and NBA Global Championship content?

We had looked at the properties and wanted to re-imagine them to make sure that we’re reaching not just people who are watching linear TV but streaming as well. We’re excited by it, and it's not just the games -- they will be doing some ancillary content, including the [USA Basketball] three-on-three finals and the Nike Hoop Summit. The nice part of this is we do reserve the ability to do a linear package of these games as well with NBA TV along with Twitch. We really like Twitch’s platform and we think they are really innovative and they reach an important demographic. They are also a worldwide platform so we’re excited that this is offering exposure throughout the world.

What does Twitch bring to the table in terms of technological innovations?

An example of some of the innovation that they do is something called co-streaming, in which the viewers who are watching the stream can add their own commentary and have their friends follow along. We think those are the kind of things that we think are part of the future of telecasts and the kind of things that we’re experimenting with across [NBA] programming. So the combination of the young demographic that they reach and the innovative ways of streaming that they offer makes us very excited about this.

You mentioned the Twitch’s audience demos. Is it a predominantly young male audience that you’re trying to reach through the platform?

It’s a young audience but I wouldn’t limit it to males. In the past they were known for streaming video game content and are still the leaders in that, but they’re looking to branch out beyond what they are doing, so it's a nice fit for what we’re trying to achieve and how they are extending their brand as well.

Will the NBA look to offer more of its content via Twitch in the near future?

Right now we’re here to announce these two deals, and we have two other deals with them so we’re really excited about the relationship we have with Twitch and we look forward to continuing to discuss opportunities with them as they arise, especially given their international nature. We’re also very invested with our current linear partners, but we want to make sure we’re reaching fans wherever they are and wherever they are going to consume content. We’ve seen good results with [Twitch’s streaming of] G-league and 2K league so we would like to continue that momentum with both [USA Basketball] and the Junior NBA.

Cheddar, the financial news network focused on younger audiences, has cut another distribution deal, this time with Twitch, the gamer-focused streaming service/platform that Amazon acquired in 2014.

RELATED: Amazon Puts Up $970 Million for Twitch

Starting Tuesday (January 9), Cheddar will launch a 24/7 linear feed on Twitch (at twitch.tv/cheddar), and include daily live content each day from 9 a.m. to noon ET. Cheddar’s Twitch channel will also enable viewers to interact with the service via a real-time chat capability.

Cheddar said it will kick off its new channel on Twitch with live interviews from this week’s CES in Las Vegas.

The deal adds another distribution conduit from Cheddar, which is also available on Amazon Channels (for $2.99 per month), Layer3 TV, virtual MVPDs such as Sling TV, Pluto TV and Philo, Comcast’s X1 platform, and apps for Android and iOS mobile devices, Apple TV and Roku players and Roku TVs.

RELATED: Cheddar Streams Onto Comcast's X1 Set-Tops

"Amazon has been a phenomenal investor in Cheddar, and we are already the only live news on Amazon Channels. Twitch is the home of true tech and gaming enthusiasts--a perfect fit for Cheddar content,” Jon Steinberg, CEO of Cheddar, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to be one of a select group launching a 24/7 channel on Twitch and a premier player in news on Twitch.”

“Cheddar has carved itself a stellar reputation when it comes to covering tech news live online," added Jane Weedon, Twitch’s director of business development. "By bringing their specialty to Twitch and embracing the interactive element of our service, it represents an experience that will be engaging for both new and existing fans of their programming."

Machinima, the digital programmer focused on gamer and “fandom” fare, has launched a new 24/7 channel on Twitch, the gaming-focused streaming service that Amazon acquired in 2014.

RELATED: Amazon Puts Up $970 Million For Twitch

The channel, called Machinima 24/7, runs a curated mix of gaming/fandom content along with two hours of live programming each week day.

Update: Like other Twitch channels, Machinima's new offering on the service is free. The new Machinima channel is ad-free to Twitch users who subscribe to the feed (and get other perks), and ad-supported if they do not. 

Machinima, now part of Warner Bros. Digital Networks, said it is emphasizing “best of” gaming and animation content at launch, including videos from Body Count Fighting and Mega Man Dies At The End, among others.

New live content on Machinima’s 24/7 offering includes VR Power Hour (a show focused on VR and mixed reality games and other content); ETC Party Time (ETC’s Ricky and Elion play a combo of top video and table games with a rotating supporting cast); Spacebar (“nerd talk for nerds, not noobs”); and Games With Shibby (a show with internet personality Shibby2142 playing top gaming titles).  

RELATED Warner Bros. Deals for Machinima

“Twitch is home to one of the largest and most loyal communities of fandom and gamer content in the world,” Machinima SVP/GM Russell Arons said, in a statement. “This new initiative with Twitch shows the power and appeal of the Machinima brand and is another important step as we continue to expand our programming service to an increasingly significant number of digital video platforms, providing them with high quality, millennial-targeted video content for today’s mobile, social media world.”

The Twitch launch expands on Machinima’s digital distribution outlets, which also include go90, Amazon Video, Xumo, Comcast’s Watchable, Sky Q, Sohu (China) and AMC (Mexico, Portugal, Spain), as well as an SVOD service that is offered on Sony’s PlayStation Vue. VRV, Ellation’s SVOD aggregation service, launched with Machinima, but has since dropped Machinima, as well as RiffTrax and Ginx, and replaced them with other services. 

Machinima doesn’t break out subscribers, but the company said the service attracts 144 million monthly uniques from around the world.

New York – Major League Baseball Business and Media president Bob Bowman said the media industry still hasn’t quite put its finger on the true viewing habits of millennials, but he does know one thing: whatever is offered to them better be on mobile.

“They’re spending a lot of time on their screens, but I don’t think we know how they are going to buy and watch content,” Bowman said at a panel session at the Paley Center for Media’s Media’s 2015 Paley International Council Summit here Friday.  “All we know is that if it’s not on a mobile device it’s not going to matter and that pricing matters. Beyond price and mobile, we haven’t learned a lot.”

Sports programming has been one of the few linear television successes because of its immediate nature – “No one watches the Super Bowl on Monday,” said Turner Broadcasting System president David Levey. And while its status as “appointment TV” has helped it with advertisers, Turner is branching out into a new area – eSports – that it hopes will capture both a digital and traditional TV audience.

Twitch founder and CEO Emmett Shear said E-Sports is garnering a huge following among millennials – about 2 million viewers watched the League of Legends championship series, a role playing video game,  on the service recently. While Shear said mobile viewing is less with gamers, it is starting to gain some momentum, with about 25% of its viewership via mobile devices.

“Nobody wants to watch the world’s best Candy Crush player yet,” Shear said.

Turner recently bought into eSports business, announcing in September that it will launch a new Counter Strike: Global Offensive league in partnership with WME/IMG that will air weekly on TBS.  

Levy said the strategy is to stage two 10-week long seasons in 2016, with Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday matches provided digitally and Friday finals matches on TBS.

While mobility is the future, Bowman said that doesn’t mean the traditional TV model is disappearing, it’s just evolving. And while sports has been a costly programming item for networks he added that he believes affiliate fees will remain stable and even grow.

“I don’t think fees are going to fall,” Bowman said. “I do think people like David [Levy] are going to ask for different rights. What’s going to happen, even in mid-deal, is that they will pay us as much or more but ask for more rights. How they deliver that content is what’s going to broaden for people like David.”

And though programmers have complained for years about the high cost of sports, Levy said he doesn’t see those charges declining in the near future.

“It’s a supply and demand marketplace,” Levy said. “There are people that want stuff and there are people that need stuff. New networks like Fox Sports [1], they’re going to need a lot of product and companies like ours want a lot of product.”

But he added that if pay TV subscribers continue to decline, there is going to need to be some correction to offset lost revenue, but didn’t elaborate.

Poker Central is making a big bet on social media as the startup linear TV channel seeks out new ways to connect with card players and enthusiasts who tend to skew into that hard-to-reach millennials crowd.

One big card it’s playing is a channel on Twitch, the popular over-the-top live streaming service now owned by Amazon, and a new interactive show starring professional player Maria Ho, who has accumulated about $2.6 million in poker tournament earnings. The live show, called Poker Central Live With Maria Ho, is being offered three times a week, with each show running about five hours in length. Poker Central is announcing specific airdates on its website and the Twitch channel itself.

The Twitch offering is viewed as an OTT complement to the 24/7 Poker Central channel, which debuted on Oct. 1. (Distribution partners had not been announced at press time.)

The Twitch channel is also one component of Poker Central’s broader social-media strategy, which also includes a presence on Facebook, which had 274,976 “likes” as of last week. Its Twitter account (@PokerCentral_) has more than 16,700 followers.

MAKING A ‘POKER FACE’

In concert with this week’s network launch, Poker Central is also holding a “Poker Faces” contest on social media whereby viewers can upload their poker face for a chance to win one of three trips to the Aria in Las Vegas and for a private lesson with one of the pros.

Each month, one of the network’s three professional poker player partners — Daniel Negreanu, Antonio Esfandiari or Phil Hellmuth — will act as judge and provide the winner with his or her lesson.

That’s all part and parcel of a plan to connect with younger viewers in places they frequent. “We know there’s a strong millennial audience interest in poker,” Clint Stinchcomb, CEO of Poker Central (and a former Discovery Networks executive), said.

He said Poker Central knew it was onto something with Twitch following a summer trial on the platform of the Super High Roller Cash Game ($250,000 buy-in).

“Millennials came to Twitch and participated aggressively,” Stinchcomb said, noting that the event generated 1.5 million unique in a bare-bones offering that didn’t include elements such as onscreen graphics and a view of the players’ hole cards.

“Twitch, for us, is about promotion,” Stinchcomb said, noting that Poker Central will also use the platform to pump in clips from the primary network, which will start off with about 2,000 hours of content, spanning categories such as tournament programming; instructional programming, news and highlights; player bios and documentaries; and poker-themed films. Poker Central’s primetime slate will include shows and series such as Super High Roller Cash Game, Heads Up Grand Slam, Poker After Dark, Doubles Poker Championship, Face the Ace and 100 Greatest Poker Moments, among others.

SOCIAL PROMO POWER

Stinchcomb is also a fan of using mobile live streaming platforms such as Periscope and Meerkat to provide an additional social-media vehicle for Poker Central. For instance, poker pros, many of whom have huge followings on social media, can use those platforms to promote upcoming telecasts.

Don’t expect to see Poker Central follow in the footsteps of CBS, HBO and Showtime and sell its primary service over-the-top, though.

“We’re not in the business of going direct to the consumer,” Stinchcomb said. “I’m not a huge fan of the direct-to-consumer business, personally … We’re focused on providing what meets the need of today’s distributor.”

Amazon’s $970 million acquisition of Twitch will give it access to a company that has locked up a good chunk of live streaming traffic in the U.S., but its overall OTT video contribution apparently won’t be nearly as significant.

Qwilt, the maker of “transparent” edge video caching systems, tabulated data for the week of August 18 and found that Netflix, to no one’s surprise, was the top online video site, accounting for 56.5% of traffic, followed by Google/YouTube (17.6%).

Amazon, according to Qwilt, was third, with 4%, followed by Hulu (2.2%) and Twitch (1.7%), so adding Twitch traffic will seemingly solidify Amazon’s third-place slot while still leaving it with plenty of ground if it’s ever going to catch up to the big dogs of OTT video.

As we noted earlier, Twitch is also closing in on becoming a top ten streaming app in the U.S., accounting for 1.35% of traffic, according to Sandvine’s most recent analysis.

But Twitch is the king of live traffic, having locked up 43% of such streaming in the U.S., according to Qwilt data posted in April, labeling Twitch as “The Netflix of Spectator Gaming,” and noting that 99% of its visitors come to watch live gaming and 58% spend more than 20 hours per week on the site.

So, with Twitch, it appears that Amazon will be buying into a popular and growing online video audience that will give it a big lead on live streaming share, and bit of a rolling start as it tries to make up ground and mix it up with overall OTT leaders, Netflix and Google.

Amazon, not Google, is poised to acquire videogame live-streaming service for more than $1 billion, according to reports from both The Information and The Wall Street Journal.

Varietyfirst reported in May that Google’s YouTube was in talks to buy Twitch, a service that lets video gamers live stream their gameplay, for more than $1 billion. At the time, The Wall Street Journal also reported on those talks, but said they were at an early stage.

The WSJ said Monday that a deal between Amazon and Twitch could be announced as soon as Monday, noting talks between Google and Twitch “cooled in recent weeks.”

Amazon and Twitch were not immediately available for comment.

Update: Amazon announced Monday afternoon that it has struck a deal to acquire Twitch for $970 million in cash.

As for potential tie-ins with Twitch, Amazon sells video games via its online retail arm and has also been selling games (and developing its own) for its new Amazon Fire TV box, which doubles as a video streaming device and gaming platform.

Twitch, according to a recent report from bandwidth management firm Sandvine, was closing in on becoming a top ten streaming app in the U.S., accounting for 1.35% of traffic, outpacing HBO GO’s 1.24%. That’s still well behind Netflix, which accounted for 31.09% of aggregate traffic (upstream and downstream) on fixed access networks in North America.

But according to recent data from Qwilt, a company that makes “transparent” video caches and sells to MSOs such as Mediacom Communications, Twitch had locked up 43% of live streaming traffic in the U.S., well out in front of WWE (17.7%), Ustream (10.9%), MLB.com (7.9%), and ESPN (6.3%).

The majority of Twitch content is free, though partners have the ability to sell subscriptions to their channels. At last check, Twitch claimed to have 1 million monthly “active broadcasters” and 45 million visitors per month. Twitch has raised $35 million  in funding so far.

Twitch’s rapid rise in popularity might be capped by a massive acquisition by YouTube, according to multiple reports. But how soon such a deal comes together is not entirely clear.

Varietyfirst reported Sunday that Google’s YouTube is poised to buy Twitch, a service that lets video gamers live stream their gameplay, for more than $1 billion, adding that YouTube is also preparing to get some static from regulators about the deal’s potential affects on the online video market. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, said the talks between YouTube and Twitch were at an “early stage,” and didn’t have a line on a potential purchase price.

A Twitch official, meanwhile, tweeted that the company “doesn’t comment on rumors.”

But if YouTube were to pull the trigger, an acquisition of Twitch would be its largest ever, if it hits the price range cited by Variety. By way of comparison, Google bought all of YouTube for just $1.65 billion in 2006.

And YouTube’s apparent interest sheds more light on an ad-supported live video streaming service that has been growing in leaps and bounds.

Twitch, according to a report issued last week by bandwidth management firm Sandvine, is on the cusp of becoming a top ten streaming app in the U.S., accounting for 1.35% of traffic, outpacing HBO GO’s 1.24%. But that was still well behind Netflix, which accounted for 31.09% of aggregate traffic (upstream and downstream) on fixed access networks in North America, followed by YouTube’s 12.28%.

But in the live streaming category, Twitch has no equal in the U.S.  According to recent data from Qwilt, a company that makes “transparent” video caches and sells to MSOs such as Mediacom Communications, Twitch has locked up 43% of live streaming traffic in the U.S., well out in front of WWE (17.7%), Ustream (10.9%), MLB.com (7.9%), and ESPN (6.3%).

The majority of Twitch content is free, though partners have the ability to sell subscriptions to their channels. At last check, Twitch claimed to have 1 million monthly “active broadcasters” and 45 million visitors per month.

In February, Twitch Interactive replaced Justin.tv Inc. as the company’s corporate umbrella name. Twitch has raised about $35 million.