46 GENIUS INTERVIEW James Dean
over someone like ESPN. So software – which we could code in half a year – they’ll charge a million dollars for. FEED eSports started as a democratised, fan-driven medium. Do you see that continuing, or is it going to be appropriated by bigger companies and broadcasters as it grows? JD Big TV networks are already looking at owning and licensing certain games. Turner in the US has opened the ELeague. But those networks are having their hands forced to get that content back on Twitch too, for free. There’s been a backlash in the gaming community, which has said, ‘You can’t take it oour primary platform, Twitch. We need to be able to see all those matches’. This has become a question in sports generally. So many sports networks are talking about ‘losing the millennial audience’, but I don’t think they are losing them, I think millennials are just watching in a dierent way. It’s just that the networks are not seeing them take up cable sports package subscriptions anymore – it’s not good value for the millennial audience. So their models need to change to be more around how viewers watch content online, free and multiplatform, and they’re willing to be advertised to. But there’s a dierential in that monetisation. You’re seeing that in sports; you’re seeing cricket go back to the open form. FEED What is your experience in getting content to viewers, now that eSports broadcasts are becoming more complex? JD In the broadcast industry there are set standards and guidelines on how you deliver a programme. The dierence is that eSports comes from an endemically OF NOWHERE AND HAVE A BUSINESS THERE ARE A LOT OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR TEAMS TO COME OUT
digital platform, and there are some steps missing from that delivery. We’re at the point where we have a programme feed that is literally encoded, on a PC usually, and put straight out to a CDN like Twitch, Facebook or Twitter. The cost of delivery is down to the downstream bandwidth to the consumer. When we are then presented with the opportunity to put our content on a TV network, we’re in a dierent situation. The TV network will send us an IP encoder and they’ll take that to a server online somewhere and then ingest it into their studio and broadcast it. It’s mad to think that you are serving millions of viewers all over the world just using the Internet. It’s amazing that we’ve gotten to that point – this huge viewership on a such a comparatively simplistic platform.
DECIPHERING DATA The UK is taking a lead in data analysis at eSports events, with live stats and player data being fed to the commentary team
The consumer doesn’t care how they get content. People are consuming content on the Internet as if it was TV. It’s all TV to them. Twitch, for example, is watched massively on mobile and it has smart TV apps and OTT apps. The costs of distributing over a CDN like Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, is lower than trying to do it over a cable network, or satellite distribution. A typical eSports broadcast reaches four to six megabits per second. To get that on a satellite channel is bloody expensive. I love looking at that existing broadcast industry and seeing how we’ve borrowed from it and learned from it. The idea that
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