Who owns Twitch? Gaming's most popular live stream platform

Many people have wondered exactly who owns Twitch as its maintained its position as the most popular live stream platform for many years. 

It’s no secret teenagers are watching television less and less, allowing live-stream websites like Twitch to grow immensely over the last few years. While it is mainly a home for gaming content, the growth seen on the site has also brought on streams consisting of more ‘Just Chatting’ and other daily activities.

Founded in 2007 by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear under the name JustinTV, the site was divided into several different categories with gaming being the fastest growing of them all. This growth led them to branch off and create Twitch.

Just a few years after creating the platform, the duo sold off to a pretty major company, but who was it?

Who exactly owns Twitch?

The first few years after the creation of Twitch were a bit of a roller coaster, with the creation of the interactive Twitch Plays Pokemon and even a bit of back and forth with a potential Google acquisition.

On August 25, 2014, Amazon purchased Twitch Interactive for a massive $970 million in cash.

The acquisition has allowed the company to use its existing web services to help the platform support more and more traffic, allowing for seemingly endless growth. Since then, the Seattle-based company has acquired countless other companies and extensions for Twitch users to take advantage of.

How did Twitch begin?

Originally founded in 2007 by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, JustinTV was a single channel broadcasted by Justin Kan who broadcasted much of his life. Kan called it “lifecasting,” much like the in-real-life streams we see on the platform today.

When 2011 came around the site had already grown into various categories, including the rapidly growing gaming category. It was then that the team decided to separate the gaming category into TwitchTV, which was renamed Twitch Interactive just months before the company was acquired by Amazon.

Now you know that the internets most popular live-streaming platform started off as a single guy broadcasting his life and now, we get our choice of thousands of streams from a wide variety of broadcasters.

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