Esports fans are still willing to turn on a traditional TV channel to watch their favorite games.
The Turner Broadcasting Station (TBS) revealed today that the first season of Eleague, an esports league created by Turner and WME | IMG, attracted 19 million viewers on the channel. Tuner noted that 3.4 million of those viewers were new to the channel and heavily came from the male millennial demographic (ages 18 to 34), showing how esports can attract a young audience. Research firm SuperData expects the esports market to reach $1.23 billion by 2019.
The first season of Eleague (which started on May 24) featured Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, a first-person shooter game. Virtus.pro defeated Fnatic in the finals on Saturday.
“Throughout its debut season, Eleague consistently delivered strong audience consumption across all platforms, including 897 million gross minutes of video consumption on TBS and Twitch,” Turner noted in a press release sent to GamesBeat. The championship had a peak of 168,500 concurrent streams on Twitch.
For the future, Eleague has recently announced a tournament for Overwatch, Blizzard’s recent team-based shooter.