NEW YORK–Ama­zon is hop­ing to be­come the ES­PN of video games.The e-com­merce gi­ant is buy­ing stream­ing plat­form Twitch In­ter­ac­tive for $970 mil­lion in cash as it seeks to take part in video gam­ing's growth as an on­line spec­ta­tor sport.Twitch is a mul­ti-chan­nel on­line net­work built for a gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple who not on­ly en­joy play­ing video games, but find it en­ter­tain­ing to watch oth­ers who might im­part tricks and tips for ex­celling at their favourite games.

Ama­zon's pur­chase is an ac­knowl­edg­ment that game­play video feeds are in­creas­ing­ly lu­cra­tive. Twitch had 55 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors in Ju­ly, up from 20 mil­lion in 2012. Most vis­it­ed the Twitch.tv Web site to watch oth­er peo­ple play live or record­ed games–com­pe­ti­tions in­ter­spersed with ad­ver­tis­ing.Dig­i­tal video ad­ver­tis­ing in the US is ex­pect­ed to reach US$5.96 bil­lion this year, ac­cord­ing to eMar­keter, up 41.9 per cent from 2013.

The deal is the lat­est ex­am­ple of Ama­zon ex­pand­ing in­to new com­mer­cial are­nas.

AP