The global audience for electronic sports, or eSports, is projected to exceed 630 million by 2025, a significant increase from 435 million viewers in 2020. Last year, the League of Legends World Championship reached a peak viewership of over 6.4 million viewers, making it the most-watched esports tournament in history.
Following the last “Summer of Sport” that we experienced, households across the country gathered to watch their favourite teams and athletes compete for glory on television, especially after the triumph of “La Roja” in the Eurocup football championship, where the final, for example, achieved a spectacular 78.7% audience share and 13,587,000 average viewers, according to the report provided by the consultancy Dos30? Based on data collected by Kantar Media.
Well, it’s fair to say that the same principle can be applied to eSports. After all, it has the same excitement and production value as any traditional sport. It’s only logical, then, that the creation of on-demand broadcasts for major events is a game-changer for eSports.
However, it is important to note that the journey has only just begun. As esports gains ground as a mainstream television experience, fans and esports event organizers are now turning their attention to the biggest screen in the home: the television.
Transition to television
Samsung Ads’ Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) data, collected across 60 million active Samsung Smart devices in Europe, shows that the transition of eSports viewers to TV may not be as difficult as one might expect. This is largely because audiences have already become accustomed to gaming on TV via consoles.
26% of devices in European households have a gaming console connected to them, and 30% of the total time spent by Samsung TV users connected to consoles is spent gaming. Therefore, the idea of gamers moving their eSports viewing habits from the PC to the TV is becoming increasingly important.
This seamless transition from PC to the biggest screen in the home is supported by improvements to the user experience of TVs, which now adapt to the viewing habits of esports fans. In Samsung’s case, this means equipping Smart TVs with the most popular pre-downloaded eSports and gaming apps: Twitch and YouTube.
The audience is everything.
At this point, it is worth asking a few questions: how can brands ensure that fans continue to associate esports with television more and more? How can esports organisers consolidate the role of television in enriching the shared experience of the event with the spectator?
In this sense, the Samsung Smart TV home screen provides a platform to capture audiences at the most opportune moment to attract them to the most attractive entertainment. Through ACR technology, Samsung Ads’ on-screen content recognition technology collects information while the audience watches their Smart TV.
Only through this first-party data can gaming brands identify which Samsung TVs are interacting with games or game-related content. This exclusive data enables TVs to be targeted in a granular way with the relevant gaming content available.
And the journey has only just begun. Enabling and hosting esports audiences on the biggest screen in the home means that viewership for esports tournaments will go from strength to strength, attracting existing audiences as well as future generations of esports fans.