Posted Wed Jul 1, 2015 at 10:04 AM PDT by Brian Hoss
Broadcasting consortium betting the sky is the limit for eSports.
In one of those transactions that seems altogether overly complicated and yet entirely significant, Modern Times Group (MTG) has just dropped 78 million Euro in order to purchase 74% of Turtle Entertainment. Turtle Entertianment is known better to the public as the entity behind ESL, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, eSports leagues in the world.
With the move, MTG, whose business has traditionally revolved around owning and operating various Scandanavian TV stations, MTG is looking to tap into ESL's crazy revenue growth. In 2015 revenue growth for ESL looks to be 50% over 2014, roughly 50 million Euro in total for the year.
As part of the move, MTG has put together some impressive numbers. That mad ESL revenue is derived from advertising, sponsorship, online league operations and broadcast media rights for events like the ESL One and the Intel Extreme Masters. All of that money-garnering is linked to the idea that eSports viewers are young, watch more than 20 hours of eSports every week, and represent a crazy amount of future buying dollars as those viewers come into their incomes.
ESL has been traditionally been weighted towards PC gaming ('League of Legends,' 'Starcraft II,' 'Counter-Strike,' 'DotA 2,' etc.) and towards European viewership, but as with eSports in general, the prominence is only growing and the reach is expanding. MTG has bought into ESL while maintaining the same structure inside ESL that has brought the current level of success. Where MTG would appear to want to fit in is in airing and distributing ESL content.
Source: ESL
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