Antigoogle
Amazon, which is about to enter the Korean market, is expanding its scope of business at a fast pace to cover e-commerce, cloud computing, digital content, smart phone services, mobile credit card payments, and games. Experts predict that Amazon will become another Google, creating a seismic ripple effect in the IT industry.
Amazon announced on August 25 (local time) that it acquired Twitch, a game video streaming service, for US$970 million. It had purchased online shopping firm Zappos at US$1.2 billion five years ago, too.
Having 50 million or so members, Twitch enbales gamers to broadcast themselves playing video games live over the Internet, and also to keep recordings. It is considered to be even stronger than YouTube in the field of game content. Amazon is expected to beef up its video relay service by means of Twitch and distinguish itself from existing service providers such as YouTube and Netflix.
The increasing similarity between Amazon and Google is leading to head-on collisions between the two giants in various sectors like online transactions and cloud computing. Google launched Shopping Express last year to tackle Amazon’s online delivery business, and Amazon came up with Amazon Web Services to set foot in the online storage market. Amazon is going to release new online advertising services this year as well.