IMG and Turner Broadcasting System launch an eSports league with weekly televised games. The first year will focus on Valve‘s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The live e-sports competitions – shot in front of a studio audience – will air Friday nights on TBS.
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WME | IMG made a big bet on the space past year through its acquisition of Global eSports Management, which represents professional video game players and commentators, and now manages several large eSports fanchises.
The field of competitive video gaming known as eSports can draw thousands of spectators and millions of viewers, but traditional television broadcasters have largely ignored the growing entertainment genre. The event will be broadcast on TBS, and will feature companion programming such as player features, docs on gaming history, and digital content that will be available via the Bleacher Report app.
“There’s no doubt in our mind that this is a sport”, said Lenny Daniels, head of Turner Sports to Variety. Under the Friday schedule, teams will still be able to compete in other popular tournaments that typically take place on weekends.
This includes turning Atlanta’s Turner Studios, home to TNT’s “Inside the National Basketball Association”, into the “East Coast epicenter for eSports competitive gaming” and will serve as the hub for the new league, according to the company. In August, Google Inc.’s YouTube introduced a separate app and site for watching live streams of people playing video games. Even Twitch itself is proof of the financial stakes, as the service was purchased by Amazon past year for $970 million. ESPN 2 broadcast a tournament of Blizzard’s MOBA Heroes of the Storm earlier this year, but received a very mixed reception.
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They chose Counter-Strike as the first game to be broadcast because it’s “really easy to digest” for people who have never watched competitive gaming before. “We can bring audiences that might not have been exposed to eSports and expose them to it”, explains Daniels. He declined to disclose how much they’re investing in the league, but said contestants will be fighting for “meaningful prize money”. According to data from research firm NewZoo included in the league announcement, the current American eSports audience is around 32 million viewers, and is expected to grow to more than 50 million by 2017. Turner and WME/IMG executives believe that by creating a new league from scratch and heavily marketing the characters and story lines, they can build up viewership.
