Short answers, pulled from the story.
Twitch launched in public beta on the 6th of June, 2011, as a spin-off of Justin.tv, which had been founded in 2007 by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, two recent Yale graduates. The gaming category on Justin.tv grew faster than any other, prompting the company to separate it as a standalone platform called TwitchTV.
Amazon acquired Twitch Interactive on the 25th of August, 2014, for just under one billion dollars in an all-cash deal after a reported preliminary agreement between Google and Twitch fell through. Forbes reported that Google backed out due to antitrust concerns tied to its existing ownership of YouTube.
By 2015, Twitch had more than 100 million viewers per month. In 2017, the platform had 3 million broadcasters monthly, 15 million daily active users, and 1.4 million average concurrent users. As of 2022, the United States alone accounted for 93 million Twitch users, representing roughly 36% of the platform's total user base.
On the 6th of October, 2021, an anonymous source posted a 128-gigabyte torrent to 4chan containing source code from nearly 6,000 internal Git repositories, payout details for almost 2.4 million streamers since August 2019, and internal plans for an unreleased storefront codenamed "Vapor." Twitch confirmed the breach and attributed it to a server misconfiguration exploited by a malicious third party, resetting all stream keys as a precaution.
Twitch exited South Korea effective the 27th of February, 2024, citing prohibitive costs from network access fees demanded by local internet service providers. Before leaving, Twitch had already restricted streams to 720p quality in September 2022 and blocked video-on-demand access in February 2023. Following the exit, the Korea Telecommunications Commission fined Twitch 435 million Korean won ($327,067) for unjustified service degradation.
Standard Twitch subscriptions cost US$4.99 per month, with Twitch retaining US$2.49 and the streamer receiving US$2.50. Through the Partner Plus Program, launched on the 1st of October, 2023, and restructured in January 2024 as the Plus Program, qualifying streamers can earn a 70/30 revenue split by maintaining 300 Plus Points for three consecutive months, or a 60/40 split at a lower threshold of 100 Plus Points.