For those not familiar with Twitch, every stream contains a "Now Playing: (Game)" thing with it, and you can select which game you're playing from a pre-defined list of games.
Bets on how long until that become a link straight to Amazon to buy said game, and how long until streamers become Amazon affiliates and start getting money for driving people to buy their games off Amazon?
Because that's the only angle I can see Amazon having here: trying to get gamers to grab games off Amazon. (And they do sell digital game downloads, so they do compete with things like Steam.)
Maybe Amazon can fix some of Twitch's more recent problems like the horrendous stream lag that makes it impossible for streamers to communicate with the stream chat since the stream now has something like 30 seconds of latency between streamer and audience. Then there's Twitch's new weird anti-piracy thing where they mute audio if they detect that the audio contains a copyrighted song (hint: for video games, that's always) and whatever other issues people are complaining about Twitch these days since I never bother to use it.
Amazon has been smashing faces with Google for a long time, and although I'd hate this be be a spate move (since I actually enjoy Twitch streams a lot), I see this as a fuck you to Google. Of course this isn't Amazon's first foray into streaming video, but it certainly is potentially their biggest dollar spend to build it up.Youtube has all but locked up the mindshare for static video, but most know that Youtube's a relatively small player in Streaming video, and Twitch is the top of the heap of this very specific and popular niche of that market.
You could very well be right in all the above and I wouldn't be surprised to see that at some point, but frankly who cares? Twitch has always had ads and the tiny bit of integration with mother ship seems fine.
As for lag, there's no 'lag' between gamer and chat. The streamer can and will put on stream delays to prevent cheaters from attempting to use up to date information against them in-game (Stream cheating does happen alas). There is always a little bit of lag, but generally speaking it doesn't happen notably most of the time. I do want IRC integration with twitch chat, but oh well... The song thing sucks, but to be fair, they are generally playing real artists songs without permission so at least that's a fair argument. I hope streamers just ditch the stream music all together. Its generally annoying more often than not anyways.