ESL Launches World’s First-Ever 24/7 eSports Channel, Plans to Broadcast Worldwide
With eSports quickly growing into a global phenomenon and rapidly gaining mainstream acceptance, Electronic Sports League (ESL) launches one of the first round-the-clock eSports television channels in the world.
Called “eSportsTV”, the channel aims to increase “content accessibility for the esports community worldwide”. It “will operate alongside existing ESL partnerships with Twitch, Azubu, Hitbox and Yahoo”, thus vastly expanding the network’s reach.
eSportsTV will be launched in May 2016 with the broadcast of ESL’s competitions and tournaments on Media Times Group’s (MTG) Viasat platforms. MTG is ESL’s parent company.
Even at this stage, ESL, along with MTG, are already planning to take a huge stride by negotiating with TV distributors and platform operators from all over the globe.
Here is ESL’s main goal, according to their official press release:
With this, ESL’s current audience of over 100 million digital viewers will soon expand even further, and each year’s over 2,000 hours of live gaming and esports content will be able to reach more territories than ever before in order to accommodate the 2 billion gamers and 250 million esports fans that the industry will have by the end of next year.
The new 24/7 esports channel will feature broadcasts of all of ESL’s biggest events in multiple gaming disciplines, such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), Dota 2, and League of Legends (LoL), among others.
The channel will also be broadcasted all over northern Europe via MTG’s satellite networks.
With Twitch alone having more than a hundred million viewers viewing 108 minutes of gaming content on average per day, ESL is looking to tap into a larger and more mainstream audience by launching its own channel.
In the past, South Korea presented eSports 24/7 on national television, with channels such as OneGameNet (OGN), GOMTV and Pandora TV showing eSports content all over the country.
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