Since January, Amazon.com's (AMZN +2.05%) Twitch has seen average concurrent viewers nearly double from about 1.3 million in January to 2.5 million in April, according to TwitchTracker.
Twitch among the most popular game streaming sites, where viewers watch others play games, sporting events, and even TV shows. While Twitch has been losing ground to rival game-streaming platforms, the recent data from TwitchTracker shows that growth is still robust.
Last month, Twitch viewers spent over 1.2 billion hours watching content. So far in April, that number is already over 1.1 billion hours watched.
Image source: Getty Images.
Several of the big tech companies want a piece of the action
Over the last seven days, the most popular games watched have been Riot Games' Valorant and League of Legends, followed by Epic Games' Fortnite, Take-Two Interactive's (TTWO 0.49%) Grand Theft Auto V, and Activision Blizzard's (ATVI +0.00%) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Riot Games and Epic Games are both backed by Tencent Holdings (TCEHY 1.37%).
Amazon and other technology firms, including Microsoft (MSFT 0.60%) and Alphabet (GOOG 0.21%) (GOOGL 0.41%), have been battling to gain more share of gamers' time spent watching streaming content. Microsoft owns Mixer, while Alphabet has YouTube Gaming.
Facebook (FB +0.22%) recently announced it was launching a dedicated game streaming app to get its share of the estimated 944 million people who watch games online worldwide.
While Microsoft has been involved with games for nearly 20 years with Xbox, Amazon has been ramping up its video game investments in recent years. Amazon acquired Twitch for $970 million in 2014, and it is working on its own games through Amazon Game Studios that "harness the power of [Amazon Web Services] and Twitch," as it says on its website.
