Five years ago, Amazon acquired Twitch and got a leg up in video game streaming. Now Amazon is reportedly preparing to wrest new revenue from Twitch by selling its streaming technology to other companies. In doing so, the company would be taking the same path it did with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which was first used internally and then rolled out for general use. AWS now accounts for half of all Amazon revenue. Should Amazon sell Twitch technology to third parties, it would likely rebrand it for potential buyers. Continue reading Amazon Reportedly May Sell Twitch Services to Third Parties

Google’s YouTube will exclusively stream Activision Blizzard’s Call of Duty League, Overwatch League, and Hearthstone Esports, which had previously been on the Twitch streaming platform. The news came just before the Call of Duty League’s inaugural match. In 2018, Twitch inked exclusive Overwatch League streaming rights for a reported $90 million. Additionally, Google Cloud will host Activision Blizzard’s library of games. YouTube Gaming head Ryan Wyatt reported that talks over the rights had been ongoing since last year. Continue reading YouTube Signs Activision Blizzard’s Major eSports Leagues

A world of opportunities to improve both the audience experience and effectiveness of advertising were the subject of a C-Space panel on the first conference day of CES 2020. All of the panelists from Hulu, WarnerMedia, Accenture, IBM, Nielsen and Twitch focused on the central role of the consumer. Yet even as advertising becomes more addressable based on consumer interest and behavior, making it theoretically possible to serve every viewer a different tailored ad, there will still be some commercials that will remain universal. Continue reading CES Panel on Transforming Contextual Advertising and Media

Market research company SuperData reported that, in 2019, the game industry grew 3 percent to $120.1 billion, of which Epic’s “Fortnite” accounted for $1.8 billion, making it the biggest game for the year. The 2019 revenue for “Fortnite” was a 25 percent drop from the previous year’s record-breaking $2.4 billion. Noting that game industry growth is cooling off, SuperData estimated that it will rise 4 percent to $124.8 billion in 2020. The data includes augmented reality, console games, eSports, mobile, PC and virtual reality platforms. Continue reading SuperData: Game Industry Generated $120.1 Billion in 2019

The live-streaming gaming platform Twitch is hugely popular but has a goal to get even bigger. At the annual TwitchCon event, the company showed off an advertising campaign promoting itself as an all-purpose live-streaming platform. This move takes place just as the site’s biggest star, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins, defected to Mixer, a rival streaming service owned by Microsoft. On the gaming front, the company also faces competition from Caffeine, a social broadcast platform that received $100 million from 21st Century Fox. Continue reading Twitch Makes a Bigger Play to Become All-Purpose Streamer

The NFL and Facebook renewed their video deal through the 2020 season. In the original deal, inked in 2017, the NFL provided recaps from all 256 regular season games plus other content for Facebook Watch. The NFL will continue to supply the season recaps, along with original content, content related to the NFL’s 100th anniversary and material from the NFL Films archive featured on “NFL Throwback.” Facebook says that, in 2017 and 2018, over 22 million people watched at least a minute of an NFL recap. Continue reading New NFL-Facebook Contract Will Run Through 2020 Season

YouTube and Facebook are looking to compete with other social platforms by offering creators more direct monetization tools. At VidCon in Anaheim, YouTube chief product officer Neal Mohan revealed that the number of YouTube personalities earning five to six figures annually has jumped 40 percent year-over-year. YouTube’s new tools will help these YouTubers earn money directly from their followers. Ahead of VidCon, Facebook hosted its “Facebook Creator Day” in Malibu, during which it showcased monetization tools, including virtual stars that can be gifted to creators and a program that enables fans to pay creators for exclusive content. Continue reading YouTube, Facebook Lure Creators with Monetization Tools

At its Next Horizon Gaming event during E3 in Los Angeles, AMD announced an impressive family of Ryzen 3000 processors to debut July 7. The Ryzen 9 3950X, which is 16-core, 32-thread and fits into an AM4 motherboard, is priced at $750. The Ryzen 3950 X also offers a 3.5GHz base clock, 4.7GHz boost clock, 72MB of cache and 105W TDP (in comparison, Intel’s 16-core has a 165W TDP which requires a more expensive motherboard). The rest of the 7nm processor lineup, in general, is expected to offer more power efficiency at a lower cost.

Continue reading New AMD Ryzen Processors Compete with Intel for Gaming

Intel is developing its Honeycomb Glacier to bring two-screen PCs to gamers. The primary panel is 15.6-inch 1080p; the secondary one is 12.3-inch 1920×720. Up until now, laptops with a secondary screen have been uncomfortable and awkward to use, but the Honeycomb Glacier resolves that problem by using a double hinge to lift both screens into the air. The lifted screen automatically stays in the angle chosen by the user due to a mechanical one-way roller clutch. A button on the left side disengages it. Continue reading Intel‘s Sneak Peek of Innovative Two-Screen PC for Gamers

To draw attention to their new video game releases, major publishers such as Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft Entertainment and Take-Two Interactive are paying top-tier gamers to play their new releases live online. Talent and marketing agencies report that these companies can pay the most popular gamers as much as $50,000 per hour to do so. On September 13, Take-Two will pay gamers to live-stream its new release “Borderlands 3,” and again for its October 4 release of “Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint.” Continue reading Publishers Hire Top Gamers to Live-Stream New Releases

Amazon and Google have become more competitive over the years, and at the latter’s annual Google Marketing Live conference this week, the company introduced new products to target online shoppers. At the same time, many shoppers now begin their search on Amazon, which has also been making inroads into Google’s traditional bailiwick of digital advertising. Marketing analytics firm Jumpstart reported that, in 2015, about 54 percent of product searches began on Google, and 46 percent on Amazon; those numbers flipped by 2018. Continue reading Amazon, Google Overlap in E-Commerce, Digital Ads, More

At a panel during this year’s NAB Show, Unity Technologies head of cinematics Adam Myhill reported that video game revenue has topped movie revenue for the last two years. “The top 25 IPs in the world are games now, and some of them are worth $10 billion, which is staggering,” he said. “On a quarterly basis, more people play Unity games than watch TV. Games reach three billion people, and the world’s population is a little more than twice that.” The point was, with such massive scale, games are bound to influence movies and other entertainment. Continue reading Impact of Multiplayer Games on Entertainment and Cinema

Snap Inc. announced yesterday that its popular Snapchat app now features multiplayer games, starting with “Bitmoji Party” and five other titles. The move is an effort to compete in a new social space dominated by “Fortnite” in which real-time, multiplayer games also serve as online communities. Snap plans to work with game developers such as Zynga and ZeptoLab. The combination of gaming and social networking is on the rise. According to Epic Games, its “Fortnite” had 250 million players as of March, while Netflix recently suggested that it competes with “Fortnite” more than HBO. Continue reading Snapchat Now Competing in the Multiplayer Gaming Arena

Amazon is evolving into an indispensable player in the games industry, with AWS providing a cloud-based digital infrastructure for live streaming. Last year, Epic Games went “all in” for AWS, allowing its massively popular game “Fortnite” to achieve global scale. Amazon Game Tech, the company’s services collection that helps game studios get on their feet, has been a mainstay for companies like Square Enix and Zynga. Amazon also owns the game platform Twitch and has developed its own game engine, Lumberyard. Continue reading Amazon’s Gaming Clout Grows in Era of Multiplayer Games

In the age of television, sports fans typically watched their games on the couch or, if they were lucky, in arenas or stadiums. With the advent of virtual reality, however, that paradigm is about to shift. The future of sports promises to be more accessible, interactive, personalized and immersive. The fan might still sit on the couch — or at an office desk — but technologies including the Oculus Go VR headset and Intel’s True View will deliver the game in exciting new angles and a 3D view of everything on the field or court. Continue reading March Madness Live VR App Signals Future for Sports Fans