YouTube Buying Twitch

Google is buying Twitch, apparently. Or YouTube is buying Twitch. Or something. I don’t report news, I just talk about it.

This seems like one of those “surprising but inevitable” plot resolutions that we aspiring authors are always told to strive for. At first you read it and think, “Whoa! Google is buying Twitch! No way!” Then a second later, you think, “Oh, of course Google is buying Twitch. We should have seen that coming a mile away.”

I know nothing about big-money corporate takeovers, but this strikes me as a case of one company buying the brand name of another company. You’ve got to figure that YouTube already knows how to stream video from a technological standpoint. (In fact, you can already stream games to YouTube can’t you? There’s a “YouTube” setting in OBS’s Broadcast Settings, at least.) Google just wants the Twitch name and the Twitch user list. They would probably throw out the entire Twitch back-end and replace it with those Google mega-god-servers or whatever.

Although, from my own personal standpoint, I hope they don’t. Because I have endless trouble playing YouTube videos. I mean, it’s almost a 100% failure rate when I go to the YouTube site itself. I click a video, it plays for 30 seconds, and then it sits there buffering for the next twelve hours, regardless of what I change the resolution to. It’s probably Verizon interfering with the packets, because with great FIOS bandwidth comes great corporate throttling, but whatever the reason, it’s very annoying. I don’t want to see that happen to Twitch. If it does, Pingzapper needs to branch out and support video too.