YouTube has reached a deal to buy the popular videogame-streaming company, Twitch, for more than $1 billion, sources with knowledge of the agreement told Variety.
Twitch is a video service that lets XBox or Playstation 4 gamers live-stream their gameplay to thousands of viewers simultaneously. More than one million people recently teamed up on the site to beat a Pokemon game after 390 hours of playing; the community is both vast and strong.
Although YouTube is by far the largest online video platform, its live-streaming services aren't nearly as widely adopted as Twitch's, which is presumably why it would want to buy the startup.
If you visit Twitch, you'll be able to browse through a selection of games that users are playing, and watch their gameplay either live or from a recording. You can chat with other people who are watching the same game.
Here's an example of what that would look like if you wanted to watch someone play a WWE wrestling game:
Twitch also partners with all the major tournament companies to stream their events on its site and has deals with partners like CBS Interactive's GameSpot and Joystiq to offer their shows.
Like YouTube, Twitch inserts ads into streams, and broadcasters can enter into partnership agreements to share the ad revenue. It offers a subscription option for streamers who average about 1,000 viewers at any given time, and for a monthly fee, those broadcasters can allow others to subscribe to their streams, removing the advertisements.
The three-year-old startup claims to have more than 45 million monthly users, and it has more peak internet traffic than Facebook or Hulu. Since becoming one of the first sites to host user-generated, live-streamed video, it has raised $35 million in funding.
Variety also reports that YouTube is preparing for U.S. regulators to take a hard look at the potential acquisition to make sure that it doesn't raise anti-competitive issues in the online video market. If the acquisition happens, it would be the largest in YouTube's history and would give it (and Google) access to one of the internet's most highly trafficked websites.
SEE ALSO: Twitch Has The Power To Make Or Destroy A Professional Gamer's Career