Esports is an ever-expanding industry that is reaching even people who don’t know anything about it. The foundation is watching matches.
Where to watch esports?
You can mostly watch esports on the streaming platform Twitch.tv
Although skeptics will tell you that pro gaming is slowly dying, viewership numbers from tournaments prove the opposite. Esports is a constantly evolving entertainment industry that attracts millions of viewers worldwide. In the article below, we will focus on the most used streaming platforms in the Western world. They are not as popular in Asia, but they do offer broadcasts from local leagues as well.
Sports broadcast overview
Where to watch esports live and for free?
The main feature of broadcasting pro gaming tournaments and competitions is that they are all free to watch. You don’t have to pay anything, which makes esports accessible to everyone. The main platforms for watching esports are YouTube and Twitch.tv. Most leagues, tournaments, and competitions are broadcasted on one of these two websites (sometimes both). Occasionally, you can also find pro gaming live streams on Facebook, but this is more of an exception than a rule. You just need to search for the live broadcast using the tournament name and you can enjoy the experience that top-level esports watching definitely is. Most bookmakers also include a link to the broadcast for the respective match, so you don’t have to search hard. As for where to find match schedules, it varies from game to game. For League of Legends, there’s the website lolesports.com with listings of all official competitions, and for Counter Strike, a similar site is HLTV.org. However, if you at least know the tournament name, it’s easy to find this information using a search engine. Today, most important matches also have high production quality, with analytical segments or other valuable informational content between matches that are worth watching for more insights. You may even be surprised to find that broadcasts of professional video game competitions rival studio productions of traditional sports.
Esports on TV
Pro gaming matches on TV? For us, it may seem like something out of reach, but in Asia it’s completely normal. Similar projects are emerging in other parts of the world—for example, in the Czech Republic there was the channel Prima Cool, which broadcast several matches in Counter Strike: Global Offensive. However, esports is not watched enough in the Czech Republic for such a program to survive. Prima therefore abandoned this experiment and in 2017 launched the show Cool Esport. But it didn’t last long on TV screens either, and pro gaming in the Czech Republic remains limited to online streaming platforms. The only gaming show broadcast on Czech television is RE-PLAY on Prima Cool—though it does not cover esports. Whether we will ever see the return of competitive gaming to TV screens remains a question. Most likely not, as there is little reason to expect such a rise in popularity in the coming years for it to be worth it for broadcasters. So, we’re left with watching esports the old way: through browsers or streaming apps.
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Michael Cermak
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