Amazon’s next Prime membership benefit could be the ability to stream live sports. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Amazon is in talks with leagues like the NFL, NBA, MLB, and a handful of others about live game rights. The fact that Amazon wants to stream live sports isn’t a new development. But the Journal did have a noteworthy tidbit: Amazon could offer a “premium, exclusive sports package” to those who pay for a $99 per year, or $8.99 per month, Prime membership. Amazon is exploring streaming rights to multiple sports at a variety of levels. The Journal reported that Amazon wanted… Read More
Amazon continues to invest in eSports, and the company’s latest initiative expands the experience to the types of casual games that many people play on their smartphones. The tech giant on Monday announced the Champions of Fire Invitational, a new eSports tournament it will host via the Amazon Appstore. On Dec. 2 in Las Vegas, 16 top gaming celebrities will play five popular casual mobile games and compete for a cash prize pool of $100,000. The event will be live-streamed on Amazon-owned Twitch, as well as via Amazon Fire TV, Amazon.com, and other social media networks. CBS Sports Network will air a two-hour… Read More
Baseball fans probably don’t think too much about cloud computing. But they are certainly being exposed to Amazon Web Services during this year’s World Series. If you’ve been tuning into this year’s Fall Classic between the Cubs and Indians — Game 7 is tonight in Cleveland — you may have noticed some branding for AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing arm. That’s because AWS powers the back-end of Statcast, a high-tech player tracking system used by MLB that measures every single play during a baseball game with radar equipment and HD optical cameras at each stadium. It produces new stats like pitching velocity, launch angles of… Read More
Amazon Game Studios, the gaming development arm of Amazon, today revealed its first titles that feature deep integration with Twitch, the live streaming company that Amazon acquired for $1 billion in 2014. The games signal Amazon’s continued investment in the gaming industry, as well as its ambitions for new verticals like eSports and live-streaming. One of the games even includes the ability for users to wager loyalty points that can be exchanged for in-game rewards — effectively moving Amazon into the emerging area of eSports betting. Amazon on Thursday at TwitchCon in San Diego, Calif., debuted Breakaway, “a 4v4 mythological sport brawler built for fast action,… Read More
SAN FRANCISCO — The fruits of Amazon’s Twitch acquisition will be front-and-center later this month at TwitchCon. Twitch CEO Emmett Shear spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday morning in San Francisco and said that his live streaming company will make a “big announcement” related to Amazon at its conference in San Diego on Sept. 30. Amazon paid $1 billion to acquire Twitch in 2014, swooping up a site lets people stream their video game sessions and attracts more than 100 million users and 1.7 million broadcasters per month. It’s described as the “ESPN of the video game industry” where viewers go to watch live… Read More
