Electronic Sports - Media Coverage

Media Coverage

The main medium for electronic sports coverage is the Internet. Electronic sports websites generally focus on professional tournaments and the top level amateur games, leaving the other games to be covered by the leagues themselves or smaller game-specific community websites if at all.

In recent years, mainstream coverage in North America and Europe has increased, and more mainstream news websites are starting to regularly provide some coverage of the major events with occasional television coverage. One of the biggest contributors to the video game media coverage are professional video gamers such as Lil Poison and Fatal1ty.

In South Korea, electronic sports and events are regularly televised by dedicated 24-hour cable TV game channel Ongamenet, and formerly MBCGame, which has since converted to a music channel. The most frequent games in South Korean electronic sports are the real-time strategy games StarCraft and Warcraft III. The South Korean scene is often cited as an model of popularised electronic sports by those who would like to see a similar level of popularity in the west.

In Germany, GIGA Television's majority of shows are covering e-sports. ESL TV was transformed into GIGA II in June 2006 but the concept failed and ESL TV was reintroduced in autumn 2007. ESL TV features e-sports only.

In the UK, XLEAGUE.TV broadcasts on SKY channel 208, showing both features on eSports and broadcasting matches from its online leagues and tournaments, which for the purpose of television shows, are shot from its studio rather than played online. This channel has ceased broadcasting as of 1 March 2009.

In France, Game One propose some e-sport matches in a show called "Arena Online" and is a partner of the Xfire Trophy, an invitational tournament. They broadcasted matches on games like Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike: Source, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, and recently Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

In the United States, gaming is seen on a variety of channels. ESPN has a show called Madden Nation, which shows gamers playing the Madden NFL game for Xbox 360. These players are competing for a cash prize. DirecTV shows live video game matches for the Championship Gaming Series. CBS aired footage of the 2007 World Series of Video Games tournament that was held in Louisville, Kentucky. G4 (TV channel) is dedicated to keeping viewers up to date on video games.

Many e-sports events are streamed online to viewers over the internet. Dreamhack Winter 2011, for example, reached 1.7 million unique viewers. Popular websites for this include twitch.tv and own3D.tv.