As a subsidiary of Amazon, Shear said that Twitch will keep its independence, but will now have access to Amazon's engineers, cloud services and more.
"What's really exciting about the Amazon deal is that [Twitch] really doesn't change," Shear said. "I get to keep doing this thing. The change is, fundamentally, we get to do it faster. We get access to these resources whether it's on the infrastructure side, relationships with media, relationships with game publishers, or advertising. All of those things are huge wins for us and I think will allow us to move faster to bring better products to the community."
Earlier this year rumors indicated that Google's YouTube division was interested in purchasing the streaming services for $1 billion, and even went as far as to confirm that a deal between the companies had been met. Today Twitch announced that Amazon will acquire the company later this year "for approximately $970 million in cash." Miranda Sanchez is a freelance writer who wishes pikachus were real. You can read her ramblings about cats and MOBAs on Twitter.