TNL Take: In Part 1, I looked at the war that Twitch was facing between YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and a host of other players and startups.

Now let's look at how Twitch is fighting back.

Also for the record, "The Empire Strikes Back", is still the best in the entire Star Wars series. Don't @ me.

Twitch has long ruled the gaming live-streaming and eSports space. Although companies like Azubu, Hitbox and MLG (Disclosure: I used to work there) tried to take on Twitch, none of them got close to Twitch’s scale.

With further irony, Azubu acquired Hitbox in January... and then promptly ran out of money.

Amazon bought Twitch for ~$1B back in 2014 and looked like they were going to cement their stranglehold on live-streamed gaming content. However, starting with Activision-Blizzard’s bargain basement acquisition of MLG, things started to ramp up in 2016 with a full court press in 2017.

As I first mentioned in "The eSports Media Evolution" in The Next Level 061 last year, we are starting to see the bifurcation of eSports content across multiple platforms.