Amazon's largest-ever layoff scale has expanded again: Media and game streaming departments lay off hundreds of people for the new year.

After laying off more than 27,000 people by the end of 2022 and 2023, American e-commerce and media giant Amazon will continue its layoffs until 2024, expanding the scale of the largest layoff in the company's history.

On Wednesday, January 10th, Mike Hopkins, Senior Vice President of Prime Video streaming media and MGM Studios at Amazon, confirmed that hundreds of people will be laid off from Prime Video and MGM Studio this week.

He stated that with the rapid development of the content entertainment industry, Amazon needs to reconsider the priority of investment allocation to achieve long-term success. This means increasing investment in areas that can have the greatest impact while exiting other non-essential projects:

"In the past year, we have examined almost every aspect of our business, focusing on improving our ability to provide groundbreaking movies, TV shows, and sports live streaming to global users, as well as delivering personalized and user-friendly entertainment experiences. As a result, investment opportunities in certain areas will be reduced or stopped, and additional investments will be made in content and product plans that can have the greatest impact."

At the same time, Twitch, the live streaming platform acquired by Amazon nearly a decade ago, announced on Wednesday that it will lay off slightly over 500 people, equivalent to about 35% of its workforce.

This is the third round of layoffs in less than a year for Twitch, which has yet to turn a profit. Last March, about 400 people were laid off. Several executives, including the Chief Product Officer, Chief Customer Officer, and Chief Content Officer, left the company in the last few months of last year. The Chief Revenue Officer, who worked for Twitch in the Amazon Advertising Department, also left.

Dan Clancy, who took over as CEO of Twitch in March last year, said that the latest round of layoffs is to "adjust the company's scale and get back on track," aligning the number of employees with the current business scale:

"Like many other companies in the tech industry, we are now adjusting the size of our organization based on the current scale of our business and conservative forecasts for future growth."

He also stated that over the past year, Twitch has been working to reduce costs and improve efficiency in order to build a more sustainable business. However, the current organizational size still exceeds the needs of the current business and is based on optimistic expectations for the next three years or longer. He also revealed that Twitch's business is still strong, with over $1 billion paid to streamers in 2023.

Some analysts point out that since Amazon acquired video game streaming platform Twitch for nearly $1 billion in 2014, the department has been unable to turn a profit for nearly a decade, mainly due to the high operating costs of running a large website that supports 1.8 billion hours of live streaming video content every month.

In combination with other layoffs in different business areas, overall, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is significantly reducing operating costs after the rapid expansion during the pandemic. He has even cut multiple projects planned during the Bezos era. In late 2023, Amazon laid off hundreds of people in the music and Alexa voice assistant departments, making layoffs a recurring theme throughout the year.In the media industry, Amazon will place more emphasis on advertising business and content licensing for revenue generation. For example, starting from January 29th of this year, Prime Video users will see advertisements in movies and TV shows, and those who opt for an ad-free experience will need to pay an additional $2.99 per month. At the same time, Amazon's original series such as "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" will be made available to media distributors outside of Prime Video for the first time.

After a stock price surge of over 80% last year, Amazon rose 1.6% during Wednesday's midday trading, resulting in a cumulative increase of over 1% at the beginning of the new year.