2017 ESPORTS TV RATINGS: INDIA'S DOTA2 DEBUT DRAWS 500K VIEWERS
DOTA2 Championship The International 2017 on Indian Television (Photo: DSport)
TNL Take: This week on The Next Level's look at eSports TV Ratings, I have finally have something I've wanted for a while: International data and especially from Asia.
Last month, the $25M DOTA2 The International 2017 Finals was shown on Indian television for the first time and the ratings delivered 500K+ "Unique Viewers".
This data is interesting for a few reasons:
- The event was tape delayed 8 hours to tap into a new audience as the hardcore fans would have watched it live digitally
- Program time was on a Sunday from 11AM - 4PM
- Most importantly, finished 3rd in Sports ratings for the week behind Cricket and the English Premier League
The data above is from India's official ratings agency BARC and I've reached out to Nodwin Gaming, the company that worked on the programming, for further clarification on the "Unique Viewers" metric as the total viewers for the full 5 hours was significantly lower. With the usual caveat of having just 1 datapoint, it's still great to see the growth of eSports TV content globally.
2017 eSports TV Ratings: ELEAGUE and Injustice 2 (Infographic: The Next Level)
TURNER
ELEAGUE continues it's solid run with Counter-Strike Season 4 with this past week's Episode 4 was just shy of a quarter million total users and double from the first episode.
Why such an improvement?
It could be attributed to top American team Cloud9 playing this past week and based on the number of their jerseys I saw at ESL One New York the week prior - they have one of the strongest North American fanbases. But Ill leave this to the casters and those that cover the space from that perspective to chat about potentially why.
ESPNU
The only other programming this week was ESPNU airing Capcom's Injustice 2 and garnering a minuscule 11,000 viewers.
I'd guess the 1AM Wed time slot isn't the best.
100+ ESPORTS TV PROGRAMS
One other fantastic milestone this week: we have now crossed 100+ eSports events or programming shown on US television this year across numerous channels.
For perspective, there were 22 total in 2016.
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