EYES ON THE PRIZE Some 10,000 tech-savvy audience members saw Astralis win the 2018 CS:GO Major at The SSE Arena
IF YOU LOOK AT NETFLIX ANDAMAZONPRIME VIDEO, THEY BROADCAST AT HIGHER BITRATES ANDRESOLUTIONS THANNETWORKSDO. WHATWE’REDELIVERING ISHIGHERQUALITY THANSTUFFTHAT’S ONNETWORK
Championship Series] a couple of years ago, that started to push the media aspect and it became almost a company in its own right.” Lane continues: “I'm responsible for a lot of things when we're live. Many of which can go wrong. It's tricky, but it's good when it's going well.” Gamers can, Lane says, be a tough crowd, in a way that broadcast television viewers sometimes aren't. “We're surrounded by an audience who use computers a lot, because that's how you play CS:GO. Our audience is more tech savvy than the normal TV or Netflix audiences. There's a degree of expectation that it needs to be technically correct.” Feedback, of course, is instant, which is both a bad and good thing. “Twitch will fall on us. Reddit will fall on us and moan… and it means we're able to
react to it and feed back to them as well. That's a very different approach to what's conventional in the industry right now,” explains Lane. In smaller venues, FACEIT has used its in-house production capacity. “When we're doing smaller events we have our own broadcast kit,” Lane says. “We did the Hard Rock Hotel in Cancun. There was no audience, it was players playing in small booths. We had a little production area and a small stage with analysis, we did that all in house.” ARENA GAMING In bigger venues, though, more is required, with equipment and crew for the Wembley event provided by Gearhouse Broadcast, a company more used to the rigours of live sports.
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