Amazon To Buy Twitch For $970 Mln. - Update

(RTTNews) - Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) Monday said it has agreed to acquire Twitch Interactive Inc., a video-game streaming service, for $970 million in cash.

Twitch, which was founded in June 2011, is a website where visitors watch live video of other people playing games. It has 55 million unique monthly visitors, with about 7 million visitors daily.

"Broadcasting and watching gameplay is a global phenomenon and Twitch has built a platform that brings together tens of millions of people who watch billions of minutes of games each month - from The International, to breaking the world record for Mario, to gaming conferences like E3," said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

Amazon will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Twitch for about $970 million in cash, the Seattle, Washington-based company said in a statement. The deal, which is the biggest acquisition in Amazon's history, is expected to close in the second half of the year.

Earlier this year, reports had suggested that Google was in talks to buy Twitch for about $1 billion, however, the deal never fell through.

AMZN closed Monday's trading at $334.02, up $2.43 or 0.73%, on the Nasdaq. The stock further gained $0.43 or 0.13% in after-hours trade.