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Twitch rolled out a few key new functions this week that leverage its relationship with tech giant Amazon. This comes, of course, years after the Seattle based behemoth acquired Twitch in 2014 for a sum of $970 million dollars. Twitch and Amazon are now set to offer a way for those who use Twitch’s popular service to stream Amazon content on its platform simultaneously with others.
This new initiative includes popular movies and television shows on Amazon Prime Video and is aimed at not only families but anyone who already has an Amazon Prime account. Anyone streaming can now be the host of a movie or television show that is public to other fans who use the popular service.
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This is part of the greater trend for shared watch parties that has blossomed during the coronavirus pandemic. It is an effort that both Twitch and Amazon can get behind to create a more social environment around consuming video content.
Furthermore, the coronavirus has forced people to stay at home in lieu of going to the movie theaters, and this is an attempt to make the viewing experience at least somewhat less isolating. All of the large streaming services have seen large jumps in traffic and interest because of the pandemic.
There are other applications on the market like this, such as Scener, but that does not utilize the library available on Amazon Prime. Scener does include the ability to stream from other services like Disney Plus, Netflix, and HBO with others in the United States. Both Disney+ and Hulu have unrolled a similar feature on their video streaming platforms, while other people are also using an extension to do the same thing for movies available on the industry leader, Netflix.
One major drawback so far is for the new Twitch services is that these Watch Parties are not yet available for mobile devices, but the company has maintained it would be releasing this feature over the next few months.
This is a clever strategic partnership for the two popular online destinations following the discovery through various studies that Twitch’s content that is not game-centric is actually performing better than the content that is related to gaming. This revelation has led to the move toward a newfound focus on streaming videos. The company started its Watch Parties service in October 2019, while Amazon started a similar service in its popular Amazon Prime Video service this past June. Thus, the deal makes sense for both entities to work more closely with each other.
One thing that many might not initially understand is why Twitch needs its own watch party area when something similar is already present on its larger parent company. The reason for this is because of the audience that Twitch reaches, which mostly consists of those in the coveted teen demographic. Amazon currently has several titles that it is pushing hard to this demographic, including shows like The Man in the High Castle and The Boys.
Amazon hopes this foot in the door technique to appeal to a younger generation results in brand loyalty and eventual sales. Many of these teens who may have access to their parent’s accounts for videos will eventually go to college or the working world and want to sign up for their own Prime accounts or other Amazon services.
It is important to note that this addition is not available on a global level yet, as there are certain licensing issues that come with accessing content from different regions. Certain shows that are available in countries outside of the U.S. on Amazon Prime Video that are not available to the U.S. will not be able to be watched via Twitch by an American audience.
A beta version of this product has already been available to certain users on Twitch since April, but there is no indication yet on how many people have taken advantage of the service.
It remains to be seen how successful this new initiative will be for both platforms, but there is little reason for Amazon and Twitch not to leverage their two distinctly popular outlets more closely together overall. In the time of the coronavirus, having easy access to content at home is crucial and the newfound emphasis on videos makes perfect sense as other rivals take similar actions.
