SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The BBC is to broadcast a major e-sports tournament over the next six weeks.
It will show coverage of the Gfinity Elite Series contest every weekend on BBC Three online.
Some 160 gamers will compete in front of live crowds for a £225,000 prize.
There are already places where large numbers of viewers watch e-sports, but one analyst said the BBC's coverage could attract new viewers to the genre.
Under the deal, the BBC will include broadcasts of exclusive editorial content from the Gfinity tournament in west London.
The games to be played include fighting title Street Fighter V, first person shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and robot football game Rocket League.
Currently, online streaming channels Twitch and YouTube command the biggest audiences for e-sports, although events are also now being shown on conventional TV stations such as Ginx in the UK.
The BBC has broadcast highlights of e-sports tournaments in the past, but said the Gfinity coverage would be "on a much larger scale".
Is watching people mash buttons must-see TV?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday July 30 2017, @01:46AM (4 children)
One difference between e-sports and ball sports is that e-sports are proprietary. If an e-sport league wants to broadcast its matches, it does so at the pleasure of the game's publisher, which has power under copyright law to demand a royalty or even ban a league from performing the game publicly at all [arstechnica.com]. A ball sport has no copyright owner; though it may have a governing body, this body lacks power to enjoin a league from streaming.
So how much are Capcom, Hidden Path, Valve, and Psyonix getting paid for this?
(Score: 2) by mth on Sunday July 30 2017, @04:38AM (3 children)
Governing bodies for several ball sports manage to get paid huge sums for TV rights. They may not have a monopoly on the game itself, but if they own the rights to the most popular competitions, they can charge a lot.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday July 31 2017, @01:28AM (2 children)
A sports governing body (SGB) that operates its own league gets paid as a league does, but as far as I can tell, it lacks say over TV rights of other leagues for the same ball sport. Or do, say, NBA and NCAA pay FIBA for the rights to broadcast basketball? I'd like to see some examples of what you're talking about in order to distinguish payments to an SGB's own league from payments to an SGB separate from a league.
(Score: 2) by mth on Monday July 31 2017, @04:09PM (1 child)
You are correct that governing bodies don't have rights over the sport as a whole. However, in practice organizations like UEFA and FIFA (football/soccer) have control over the most popular leagues and tournaments and earn a lot of money from them. Technically, they are non-profits, but they operate in a very commercial way.
Getting watchers invested in a brand new league is difficult and rarely happens. The only example I can think of is darts, where the competitions from the PDC became more prominent than the ones from the original governing body BDO.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday August 01 2017, @05:29AM
And when it does happen, it often leads to a merger, as when the National Basketball League merged with the rival Basketball Association of America and later the American Basketball Association to become the NBA, or when the NFL absorbed the AFL and expanded into markets proven by the USFL, or when the National League of Professional Baseball Players merged with the rival American League to form Major League Baseball. I concede that few rival leagues are successful, but at least they are allowed to commence operations in the first place without begging anyone for permission to play a particular sport.