TBS last Friday night from 10:00pm-2:15am ET averaged 255,000 viewers for its first-ever ELeague telecast. The Week 1 telecast of group play for “Counter Strike: Global Offensive” drew 509,000 viewers for the primetime portion of the telecast from 10:00-11:00pm. For comparison, ESPN2 on April 10 from 8:00-10:22pm drew 106,000 viewers for a "Heroes of the Dorm" collegiate e-sports telecast. TBS’ ELeague telecast on Friday night also saw a 129% increase in the male 18-34 demo compared to the average of what the net had in that same timeslot the prior three weeks. TBS in the same window had aired a combination of reruns for “Big Bang Theory,” “Cougar Town” and “Separation Anxiety,” as well as feature films like “Oz The Great And Powerful.” But the big play for the Turner/WME-IMG-owned ELeague is online. Coverage of ELeague began on e-sports streaming platform Twitch on May 24 and ran through the Friday night finals (May 27). During the debut week, ELeague was the No. 1 channel on Twitch, drawing 4.3 million video starts in that four-day time frame. ELeague also drew double the number of concurrent streams compared to a “non-major” e-sports event on Twitch.
