Partners of Twitch—the popular streaming site recently bought by Amazon for about $1 billion—live the good life. And it's about to get even better.
The partners—an exclusive group of the site's most popular streamers—receive special promotion on the site, have stop and go control over their commercials, and also launch subscription systems, allowing them to offer premium content for a fee.
These fees have allowed several streamers to focus on gaming full-time.
Now, Twitch is making major moves to allow all partners to take that next step to making a living off the site: merchandising.
"A big part of what we need to do at Twitch is figure out how to help content creators make more money," Kevin Lin, Twitch's COO, told me in an interview at the Intel Extreme Masters esports event in San Jose this weekend. "In the very early days [of Twitch], the top piece of feedback was 'as a content creator, I wanna build a career... just like how I can on YouTube.'"
To help make that happen for more of its partners, Twitch recently announced a major partnership with Teespring, a T-shirt manufacturer that specializes in creating custom apparel. Initially, 200 of the most popular streamers will be allowed to sell T-shirts with their designs on them directly on Twitch.
The program is intended for all partners and would be unveiled "sooner rather than later," the company's PR director added.
All of the designs are viewable in the Twitch Store, and streamers who get in already have their own Teespring storefronts and can embed them into their profile pages. Lin also hinted that streamers that are part of larger groups, such as esports teams, will be able to create stores that sell merchandise from the larger organization.
In-demand comedian Katt Williams offers up The Pimp Chronicles courtesy of HBO. Williams shares his thoughts on such topics as drugs, politics and pop culture in this special event.
Pimps Up, Ho's Down is a 1999 television documentary about pimping in the United States as part of the HBO documentary anthology series America Undercover. The film features interviews with American pimps and explores the modern pimping lifestyle.
Jeremiah, a troubled young male, tries to deal with the cards he's been dealt with in life. He makes a decision to help his struggling mother, which ultimately leads to his demise.
A group of police officers in Ohio stand accused of exchanging text messages including "jokes" along the lines of "I hate niggers. That is all."
According to WHIO, the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office launched an investigation which found that five sheriff's deputies traded similar texts between November 2011 and January 2013. The texts were brought to Sheriff Phil Plummer's attention by NAACP Dayton President Derrick Forward, resulting in the indefinite suspension of Capt. Thomas Flanders and Det. Michael Sollenberger.
Employment attorney Jason Matthews told WHIO that Flanders and Sollenberger could still be terminated despite the fact that the messages were sent in private. The three remaining officers have yet to be identified, and WHIO notes that they have yet to be suspended.
The officers insist that the texts were for the purpose of amusement, which is points to an even bigger problem.
Earlier in the week, a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo for his role in Eric Garner's death. Sources claim that the panel may have come to this conclusion because the district attorney never asked them to consider lesser charges.
According to NBC New York, Staten Island District Attorney Daniel Donovan didn't ask the grand jury to weigh reckless endangerment charges in Garner's fatal choking. Instead, they only considered possible charges for manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide.
Although it's unclear why Donovan arrived at this decision, the New York Daily News asserts that it's because it would've been more difficult to indict Pantaleo on the more serious charges:
Those charges are harder to get because they imply that the cop knew his actions could result in death or serious injury — and did them anyway.
Donovan explained his decision to remain silent on the matter in a statement:
I respect the court’s exercise of its discretion, and will abide by the court’s order. As such, I will have no further comment in connection with the grand jury proceedings relating to the matter of the investigation into the death of Eric Garner.
The year is 2029. John Connor, leader of the resistance continues the war against the machines. At the Los Angeles offensive, John's fears of the unknown future begin to emerge when TECOM spies reveal a new plot by SkyNet that will attack him from both fronts; past and future, and will ultimately change warfare forever.
A hard-working small business owner (Vince Vaughn) and his two associates (Tom Wilkinson, Dave Franco) travel to Europe to close the most important deal of their lives. But what began as a routine business trip goes off the rails in every imaginable – and unimaginable – way, including unplanned stops at a massive sex fetish event and a global economic summit.
Witness the rebirth of a legend in this spine-tingling descent into true terror. When a vacationing family is brutally murdered, an intrepid attorney, Kate Moore (A.J. Cook), is assigned to defend Talan (Brian Scott O’Connor), the main suspect and mysterious loner with a strange medical condition. As she delves into his shadowy past and runs scientific tests to prove his innocence, Talan’s darker instincts soon surface with unparalled violence. As Talan slashes and shreds his way to freedom, Kate must stop the atrocity she’s unleashed before the city is torn apart limb by bloody limb.
