Twitch Interactive Inc, the video-game streaming service Amazon.com Inc acquired for almost US$1 billion two years ago, hinted at what could be the next sensation in Internet broadcasting: watching people eat.
Dubbed “social eating,” the practice is popular in South Korea and is gaining in popularity in the US, Twitch chief executive officer Emmett Shear said on Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
It is a difficult pastime for people in the US to initially grasp, he acknowledged, but he said it is gaining traction, along with rising demand for non-gaming content.
Disbelief about the growth potential for Twitch, a platform for watching people play video games, has taught him not to discount something he does not personally understand, Shear said.
“I’m cautious about writing anything off,” Shear said in an interview on Bloomberg TV.
“I think it could be huge,” he added.
A Twitch streamer with the user name Hacklyn was eating a bowl of soup on Wednesday morning with about 20 people watching live.
She was listening to music and chatting with people about relationships while they watched her dig in.
Investors have been watching to see how Amazon integrates Twitch’s highly engaged audience of video-game enthusiasts — numbering 10 million daily users — with its offerings in online shopping, streaming video and music.
Last month, the Seattle-based retailer broadcast two original TV pilots produced by its own studio on Twitch’s service, seeking to get feedback from its users.
As the company further seeks to combine services from its businesses, could the next big step be streaming video of a gaming champion eating a box of cookies delivered via an Amazon drone?
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last