ESports is coming to primetime on TBS.
The Turner-owned cable network, which reaches 90 million homes, announced today it’s teaming up with talent conglomerate WME-IMG to air 20 live programs of teens playing the massively popular video game “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” beginning in 2016 on Friday nights.
Besides a smattering of airings on ESPN, this deal marks a significant milestone for the blossoming industry since the show now has a permanent primetime time slot on a massively distributed basic cable network. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.
Few specifics about the show, including a name for the newly formed league, prize money and sponsors, have been revealed, but TBS said it’s building an arena to house the competitions at its headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The events will be streamed online while it’s on television.
TBS’s announcement coincides with a relaunch for the 39-year-old network, where it will sport a new logo and several new shows including one from The Daily Show alumna Samantha Bee.
ESports’ demographics are attractive to both advertisers and media companies. Research firm Newzoo reports that the hard-to-reach demographic of males aged, 21 to 35 years old, make up a majority of eSport gamers, with 22 percent of them classified as “big spenders.”
Thirty-two million people participate in eSports, with the number expected to reach 50 million in the next to years with live and online viewership crossing 200 million.
Despite that those are very attractive figures, they haven’t yet translated to boffo television ratings. ESPN’s latest airing of an eSports competition “flopped” in the ratings, garnering a mere 96,000 viewers.
If that’s what TBS gets, at least it has Family Guy reruns to rely on.
Photo via Wikipedia.
-
Now hiring: The FTC seeks ad tech and social media experts as it shifts its approach to investigating data abuses
The FTC's chief technologist aims to shift away from reliance on legalistic remedies to stop data abuses and wants technologists who understand ad tech and algorithms to help.
-
LinkedIn looks to premium publishers as a way to drive subscriber revenue
The pilot program is designed to drive subscriber revenue for both participating publishers as well as LinkedIn.
-
How Yahoo is experimenting with platforms and partnerships to grow its audience
Yahoo wants to get fanatics for sports, finance and lifestyle all actively spending within its owned and operated portfolio of media brands.
-
SponsoredHow the ad industry can use its borrowed time to future-proof first-party data solutions
Trent Lloyd, co-founder and head of brand solutions, Eyeota Google’s updated timeline for its Privacy Sandbox rollout, including its two-year delay of third-party cookie deprecation on Chrome, didn’t come as a surprise to many industry observers, given the limited utility of Google’s FLoC and the slow momentum of the Privacy Sandbox in the World Wide […]
-
In some California privacy cases, analytics trackers are in the crosshairs — and violators could be charged by the cookie
Letters companies have received from the state's attorney general ask them for details about cookie tracking for ads and analytics.
-
The Financial Times plans to open 2 more U.S. bureaus to target ‘global Americans’
The Financial Times, with investment from owner Nikkei, is opening new bureaus in the U.S. to cover American companies that are players on a global scale, for U.S. readers.
