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Just because Amazone owns Twitch doesn't mean they pay themself, they are still two distinct legal entities and Twitch is competing with other non Amazone owned

Just because Amazone owns Twitch doesn't mean they pay themself, they are still two distinct legal entities and Twitch is competing with other non Amazone owned companies (e.g. Kick) for the same resources. If Twitter would not pay Amazone I think it might even somewhat fall under competitive distortion/unfair competition. Large steams do amortize cost while the bandwidth cost is somewhat scaling per viewer there are other cost which scale per used resolution and per region the stream is streamed to. So on a per-view bases large streams are often not the most expensive. But very small streams with viewers across continents have the highest per-view cost. AD revenue is split but the main problem is Twitch ADs are not worth much and a bought way to little, often leading to no ADs playing at all for many (non US) regions. >they play 3 minutes of ads that interrupts the entire content every 10 minutes. They do not (typo?), it's depending on the streamers setup but ADs are normally more in the 3min per hour basis which is fine to be honest. There are sometimes some additional banner ads but they don't cover the content, don't "play" and are not that disruptive. And there is Twitch Turbo which disables all ADs but streamers still get the AD money. Through that isn't worth it's money for a lot of people.

scarface_74 3y ago
> If Twitter would not pay Amazone I think it might even somewhat fall under competitive distortion/unfair competition. It’s “unfair competition” for a company to use its own servers to host its own business?
- k12sosse 3y ago
  More like Google sweetening the pot for Play store with ad sale discounts, less like Microsoft having the audacity to bundle IE with the OS. If AWS was Twitch Web Services it would be OK. But Amazon is not Twitch so it is anticompetitive.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    So now you’re saying a company is not allowed to branch out and have any other applications on their own servers? Should Microsoft also not be allowed to host online Office on Azure?
    - dathinab 3y ago
      If Office and Azure are operate by two companies owned by Microsoft instead of MS directly then MS the one operating Office would have to pay the one operating Azure for the hosting.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        AWS is not a separate company and even if they were, there is nothing stopping one company from negotiating with another company for special negotiated rates. You don’t think Netflix is paying rack rates for AWS do you?
        dathinab 3y ago
        no AWS _is_ a different company then Twitch, Amazone owns Twitch but Twitch isn't Amazone. and yes you can always negotiate rates but it has to be in some "reasonable boundaries" so Twitch still has to pay Amazone and Amazone can't just set the price to just the cost Amazone has, even less so below.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        This is not in any way shape or form true. When you go into the internal “phone tool” if you work for Amazon, AWS, Twitch etc you still eventually get to the same CEO. (Former AWS employer)
        dathinab 3y ago
        you are aware that twitch still has its own CEO right?
        scarface_74 3y ago
        And Jassy was also the “CEO” of AWS before he became the CEO of Amazon. And when I went to my phone tool, he still reported to Bezos at first
  - stale2002 3y ago
    This is not at all how it works. Twitch giving money to Amazon is just a number in a computer somewhere. Even if the government "forces" them to change those numbers on a computer, there is nothing stopping Amazon from just giving twitch more money to fund it, if they knew it were "profitable". The real reason is that twitch buys AWS services at cost with zero profit to anyone, and even at those low prices it still can't make money. Twitch is doomed.
    - whatyesaid 3y ago
      How do you know Twitch is "buying" AWS servers so cheaply though? Anyways, infrastructure costs is not as important as market share in the long run, bandwidth and transcoding costs will go down with time. If you build a platform where nobody has grounds to compete with you like Twitter, (Threads tried), you've got something really valuable - maybe not 44 billion worth but still.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        Every internal departments budget is charged for their AWS services The citation below isn’t entirely true, internal departments aren’t charged “retail” prices. But they are charged and if you have multiple accounts opened testing different releases of an open source “AWS Solution” in multiple regions that uses the then $5K a month Kendra service along with largish ElasticSearch, you will show up on the naughty list (ask me how I know) I’m no longer an employee if AWS https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-service-i-hate-the-most/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-service-i-hate-th... > When internal game development teams use Isengard accounts, they must pay (via internal accounting) the same rates for AWS compute cycles that outside retail customers pay, according to people close to the teams
        whatyesaid 3y ago
        Yeah but Twitch is so big it would never pay retail rates to any cloud service, even given the rates for the bulkiest users. And because it's Amazon owned it's not a question of going to AWS but how much they'd negotiate. So on paper Twitch can lose them money but Amazon makes money through AWS. YouTube is break even and imagine how much content is uploaded and stored there per second, forever. Twitch VODs are deleted after 2 months. Most streamers don't even get any viewers. Those that get viewers get people paying real money on top of ad spam. The numbers don't really add up like how Amazon often pays $0 in tax.

scarface_74 3y ago

> If Twitter would not pay Amazone I think it might even somewhat fall under competitive distortion/unfair competition. It’s “unfair competition” for a company to use its own servers to host its own business?

k12sosse 3y ago
More like Google sweetening the pot for Play store with ad sale discounts, less like Microsoft having the audacity to bundle IE with the OS. If AWS was Twitch Web Services it would be OK. But Amazon is not Twitch so it is anticompetitive.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  So now you’re saying a company is not allowed to branch out and have any other applications on their own servers? Should Microsoft also not be allowed to host online Office on Azure?
  - dathinab 3y ago
    If Office and Azure are operate by two companies owned by Microsoft instead of MS directly then MS the one operating Office would have to pay the one operating Azure for the hosting.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      AWS is not a separate company and even if they were, there is nothing stopping one company from negotiating with another company for special negotiated rates. You don’t think Netflix is paying rack rates for AWS do you?
      - dathinab 3y ago
        no AWS _is_ a different company then Twitch, Amazone owns Twitch but Twitch isn't Amazone. and yes you can always negotiate rates but it has to be in some "reasonable boundaries" so Twitch still has to pay Amazone and Amazone can't just set the price to just the cost Amazone has, even less so below.
        scarface_74 3y ago
        This is not in any way shape or form true. When you go into the internal “phone tool” if you work for Amazon, AWS, Twitch etc you still eventually get to the same CEO. (Former AWS employer)
        dathinab 3y ago
        you are aware that twitch still has its own CEO right?
        scarface_74 3y ago
        And Jassy was also the “CEO” of AWS before he became the CEO of Amazon. And when I went to my phone tool, he still reported to Bezos at first
- stale2002 3y ago
  This is not at all how it works. Twitch giving money to Amazon is just a number in a computer somewhere. Even if the government "forces" them to change those numbers on a computer, there is nothing stopping Amazon from just giving twitch more money to fund it, if they knew it were "profitable". The real reason is that twitch buys AWS services at cost with zero profit to anyone, and even at those low prices it still can't make money. Twitch is doomed.
  - whatyesaid 3y ago
    How do you know Twitch is "buying" AWS servers so cheaply though? Anyways, infrastructure costs is not as important as market share in the long run, bandwidth and transcoding costs will go down with time. If you build a platform where nobody has grounds to compete with you like Twitter, (Threads tried), you've got something really valuable - maybe not 44 billion worth but still.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Every internal departments budget is charged for their AWS services The citation below isn’t entirely true, internal departments aren’t charged “retail” prices. But they are charged and if you have multiple accounts opened testing different releases of an open source “AWS Solution” in multiple regions that uses the then $5K a month Kendra service along with largish ElasticSearch, you will show up on the naughty list (ask me how I know) I’m no longer an employee if AWS https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-service-i-hate-the-most/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-service-i-hate-th... > When internal game development teams use Isengard accounts, they must pay (via internal accounting) the same rates for AWS compute cycles that outside retail customers pay, according to people close to the teams
      - whatyesaid 3y ago
        Yeah but Twitch is so big it would never pay retail rates to any cloud service, even given the rates for the bulkiest users. And because it's Amazon owned it's not a question of going to AWS but how much they'd negotiate. So on paper Twitch can lose them money but Amazon makes money through AWS. YouTube is break even and imagine how much content is uploaded and stored there per second, forever. Twitch VODs are deleted after 2 months. Most streamers don't even get any viewers. Those that get viewers get people paying real money on top of ad spam. The numbers don't really add up like how Amazon often pays $0 in tax.