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takyon writes:

Call it competitive gaming, eSports, or just big business. "The big events are already bigger than the biggest events in sports," says Twitch COO Kevin Lin:

The industry is anchored by what is referred to as multiplayer online battle arena games, like the League of Legends, where one or several players face off in a digital arena. Watching people play professionally has been popular in Asia for years, but is now also gaining steam in the U.S.

In fact, those powering the industry say it's well on its way to becoming the next major professional sport alongside football and baseball. The biggest tournaments are already filling entire arenas, including New York City's Madison Square Garden.

The average Twitch user spends two hours a day engaging with the site. Lin said it's not unusual for some users to stretch to the five-hour mark for some of the more popular players and events. In total, Twitch logs more than 100 million unique viewers a month, with those viewers racking up a collective 20 billion minutes of viewing time of the more than 11 million videos that are broadcast. The Twitch app has been downloaded more than 23 million times since its launch in 2011.

In 2014, Riot Games' League of Legends world championship had roughly 27 million streaming views, more than the average viewership of the individual games of the World Series and roughly the same as the amount of people that tuned in for this year's NCAA final.

Last month, ESPN 2 made history by airing the finals of Blizzard Entertainment's collegiate "Heroes of the Dorm" competition on TV for the first time.