In the escalating fight between Twitch and Mixer, YouTube is the real winner

The live-streaming wars aren’t really about streaming at all: they’re about the future of live television. The combatants — Twitch, Mixer, and Caffeine, at the moment, although Facebook and YouTube shouldn’t be counted out just yet — have their own visions for what that looks like, and what it should mean for consumers. To that end, Twitch, Mixer, and Caffeine have begun to compete in earnest over exclusive deals for big names in streaming.

What’s interesting about those deals is that they seem to overlook the internet video elephant in the room: YouTube. Most of the biggest live-streamers on the internet also post videos of their streams to the site, which nets them extra money without making them do more work. That means YouTube is...

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