There are already lots of adult content sites; the reason these streamers exist on twitch specifically is because they can reach an audience that isn't on adult sites.
There is not enough money in it for Amazon to start ramping up in pornographic material. The chances of brand degradation, possible boycotts due to women looking young/revenge porn is much much too high to be worth it.
Amazon already is in the pornographic-streaming market, just at a remove.
Who do you think the biggest customers of AWS's media-streaming IaaS infrastructure offerings are? People who need to move terabytes per second of live video over the Internet, but for some reason cannot make an Enterprise partnership with one of the public-facing media-hosting services (e.g. YouTube, Hulu, etc.) There's really only one industry matching that description.
I'd even bet that those infrastructure services already share a common backbone with Twitch. So this offering already basically exists. It's just white-labelled, rather than Twitch-branded.
That’s a gross oversimplification. That’s like saying “every application hosted on a server running Linux is basically the same”. AWS makes money by hosting all kinds of things, it doesn’t mean Amazon the company is a once removed partner of every single company using their infrastructure.
> It doesn’t mean Amazon the company is a once removed partner of every single company using their infrastructure.
I mean, that was my point: that Amazon prefers the optics of not being a partner to these companies, even though, technologically (not financially), there's no difference between what they're doing right now, and what they'd be doing if they ran a "Twitch for porn." Which is why they're just fine with being twice-removed partners to these companies, through vertical integrators.
Amazon are fine with e.g. Heroku and other PaaSes repackaging their IaaS services into convenient vertical-specific packages. Amazon don't want to run Heroku; they just want to eat 90% of Heroku's margins. Which essentially gets them all the upside of running Heroku anyway, without the risks of actually going into the PaaS vertical, marketing to small customers, etc.
The same logic applies with porn production: Amazon would much rather not create "Twitch for porn", but rather allow someone else to use AWS to create a "Twitch for porn", and then have that service pay AWS exorbitant egress-bandwidth fees. All the same benefit of owning such a company themselves, with none of the hard work, and better yet, none of the tarnish.
But also, keep in mind: if 80% of the customers for an infrastructure service are using it for a use-case in the X vertical, then that service is effectively a service-provider in the X vertical, whether it wants to be or not. Even if AWS isn't explicitly running a "Twitch for porn", if 80% of e.g. Kinesis Streams infra is being allocated to transcoding porn, then you'd better believe that the devs for Kinesis Streams, and the ops staff that run it, both know what their service is usually used for — and likely have spent time tuning their service to cope with the particular needs of that workload. To do otherwise would be irresponsible!
Well that's pretty much my point, I said Amazon didn't want to make more money, I said that they didn't want to degrade their brand. It's not some moral high-ground, they just did cost analysis and realized that it was not worth it to get directly involved (as in branching out).
They are talking about moving the existing lewd stuff out onto a new platform, not starting a PornHub alternative. There is obviously enough in it for Amazon, otherwise they would just ban the pools outright.
I understand the distinction, but ultimately the reputation issue for twitch would be identical.
"They're opening a porn site?"
"No no, its a separate site for softcore...err sexually suggestive material"
It isn't a win either way, and they'd be entering established markets that already have entrenched businesses and wouldn't have the 'walk through' traffic the video games sections of twitch provide.
Yes, but it is more effective to let someone else own the second site that offers adult content. Then, for advertisers, there is no brand confusion caused by a common owner.
