According to foreign media news, Amazon Inc. (AMZNUS) is poised to lay off 35% of its workforce, or about 500 people, in the latest in a series of layoffs at the company. The layoffs could be announced as early as Wednesday due to concerns over Twitch's losses and the departure of several executives from the company in months.
Company executives have said that while Twitch relies on Amazon's infrastructure, the cost of running a large stream that supports 1.8 billion hours of live content per month is very high. Twitch CEO Dan Clancy said in a blog post last December that the company would cease operations in South Korea because the cost there was "prohibitively expensive."
Twitch has put more emphasis on the advertising business in recent years. Nine years after Amazon acquired the company, Twitch is still still unprofitable, according to people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity for discussing undisclosed information.
According to the data, in 2014, Amazon announced the acquisition of Twitch Interactive, a game ** service provider, for more than $1 billion in comprehensive **. The deal was Amazon's largest acquisition in 20 years. At that time, the purpose of the acquisition was that Amazon saw games as the key to the company's strategy to further expand its entertainment services. 