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another point: if espn gets broadcasting rights, would that make re-streaming the tournament games without written consent from ESPN and ActiBlizz punishable by law and subject to fines?
if so, wouldn't that result in an adverse effect of what this is trying to accomplish?
i can see how it would be good for ESPN and ActiBlizz, but how exactly does this help the SC2 community?
if the concern is making e-sports bigger in America, just realize that ActiBlizz would profit more from televising tournaments for Call of Duty: Rehash of the Fiscal Quarter than for Starcraft 2.
just put some more thought into things before blindly spam e-mailing a company just because everyone else is doing it. just because it's easy to send an e-mail doesn't make it a good idea.
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The issue with sc2 broadcasting is that viewers need to
1) accept gaming or "esports" as a valid medium (not too many americans can)
2) have some general interest in the game. Unlike real sports, sc2 is not intuitive in how it works. With something like basketball casual viewers can tune in and think "ok, so there's fast short guys and slower big guys and they're trying to get ball into that basket. The rest of the details I'll learn over time". Even if they can make out what's happening in a battle, it comes down to more questions than entertainment, "ok, those fat brown things were looking really strong, but now that the other guy has those big spiders, they all die in like 2 seconds? I'm confused. And why doesn't it just kill those octopus things shooting right at it?". SC2 is not at all something a person flipping through channels wouldn't be expected to stop and watch for too long.
So if I was espn, I'd be extremely wary of the success sc2 would have on the channel, and not sure if I would take the risk.
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Video games are just hard to watch. Watching someone play SC2 or Halo or CoD or Counter-Strike is just absolutely boring unless you know the intricate details of what's going on. These games don't have the same background as sports do. People here learn the rules of basketball, football, baseball, hockey as they grow up. No one teaches it to you but most people know the rules almost instinctively. It's ingrained into our culture. Learning a game like SC2, where 99% of the action lies in the details (eg he kills 6 probes with a hellion 7 minutes into the game), requires a level of familiarity that most people don't want to get into. For a casual audience, there's almost no way to pick up these details by watching. Sure, we can see that microing marines against banelings is impressive and cool, but to a casual observer, this feat is lost on them. The other problem is that most pro-gamers have interesting personalities to TL.net, but to your casual observer, they just look like skinny, geeked-out nerds. Things like bad manner and trash talking is generally out of view for most sports; it happens on the field and it stays on the field. Arrogance is usually not tolerated very well in most circles. Finally, e-sports is extremely volatile. Games rarely stay popular for more than a couple years. Brood war is the anomaly in the room. Other games such as Halo, CS, CSS, CoD all falter or fail within a few years of making it big. Counter-Strike used to be the biggest e-sport in America. What happened to it? Well the CPL failed and the player base was split between 1.6 and Source. Nowadays, it's a pretty niche market with a bunch of small tournaments and a couple big ones. It's no where near the peak in the early 2000s. There's nothing guaranteeing the same won't happen to SC2.
Remember, things like poker and darts are extremely successful even though it may not seem obvious to you. Any single poker site has a bigger draw than all of Battle.net. There are literally millions of people playing poker on any day of the week. I know more people who player poker than go to bars nowadays. That's the everyman draw to poker. It also suffers all of the problems I listed above, but poker succeeded because it's had 70+ years to fester in our collective consciousness. SC2 hasn't even hit 6 months yet.
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8748 Posts
Someone needs to produce a show that can be presented to ESPN. Asking ESPN to broadcast SC2 is a dead end. You gotta have content for them in the form of something they can broadcast. And then you gotta show that you can get enough people interested in watching that content to justify it to sponsors so you can sell ad space.
If ESPN produces the show, it's gonna sick. People from e-sports need to have a heavy hand in it.
LOL??
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Tbh, I think have E-Sports as an "On Demand" option that many cable companies offer would be more feasible depending on cost of course. The problem with mainstream TV is they have to cater to all their audiences, and while G4 might be the best option of all the ones you e-mailed, it's still a much tougher sell in NA though E-Sports are definitely catching on.
If you view E-Sports as say NFL or NASCAR, they are entirely driven by advertising in the US pure and simple. Punt return, commercial. Field goal, commercial. Timeout, commercial. With SC2 games sometimes lasting 30 minutes+ it would need to be handled similar to Soccer with the halfs never being interrupted and while Soccer is catching on, think how far behind Europe NA is in this department?
Good to see soemone pushing on the broadcasters to at least consider it though  !
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Traditional sports is simple, easy to understand. Get the ball in the hole, across the line, over the wall or into the net, all fine and dandy and entertaining to billions of people world wide.
World of Warcraft Arena battle is a pretty simple concept right? Try to eliminate your opponent's health points. As many of us can agree, a WOW arena fight is far easier to watch and understand than a Starcraft 2 match. I had the pleasure to witness one of these simple WOW arena battles during Blizzcon and I have to be honest, I HAD NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING ON! Keep in mind that I did play WOW for a few years, but these high-end, top of the ladder arena matches were super complicated in my eyes. The WOW arena matches didn't hold my attention and I quickly tuned off. Try showing your parents or girlfriend, that never experienced Starcraft 2 gauge their attention span. I am willing to bet they will walk away within thirty seconds.
Try watching something you have no interest in and see how long you can watch without tuning out. I'd be willing to bet 99% of the US population never played nor have any interested in Starcraft.
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This should be Blizzard job, they must convince ESPN the way KESPA convinced ten yeards ago MGN and OGN to broadcast Starcraft 1. If they want e-sport to be big in USA they must find a sponsor and a lot of other stuff. Just you and some emails will solve nothing because the tv station needs money to broadcast anything.
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On December 04 2010 08:04 leonardus wrote:
This should be Blizzard job, they must convince ESPN the way KESPA convinced ten yeards ago MGN and OGN to broadcast Starcraft 1. If they want e-sport to be big in USA they must find a sponsor and a lot of other stuff. Just you and some emails will solve nothing because the tv station needs money to broadcast anything.
What? KesPA didn't exist then; it only got formed because MBCGame and OnGameNet were broadcasting it.
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Syfy would be another channel to email it to. Syfy has that WCG Ultimate Gamer show on it, which inControl was a part of. One of the problems with ESPN is that, at least on the main channel, they love to just replay Sportscenter all through the night, which is when the GSL is going on for us here in the US. ESPN2 would be a hopeful for about 1 tournament a year. G4 and Syfy would be the best shots. I'd love to be able to watch SC2 in HD on a nice tv instead of hooking up my PC to the tv.
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MLG has connections with ESPN, so that would be the best bet.
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man it took so long for UFC to even be mentioned on ESPN and it was at least 1000x more popular than esports
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What are people smoking >,<"
ESPN? to broadcast E-Sports? Not a chance on earth.
A smaller broadcasting company maybe , not ESPN , their viewership is well over millions. And they have much much better content to broadcast than SC2. Even the 10th replay of Sportscenter would have more viewers than the GSL.
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I think this would really work well if someone in the Starcraft community knew someone at a boradcasting channel. I don't think it necessarily has to be G4/ESPN/SPIKE if even some random channel like AMC ( off the top of my head XD) as long as WE the starcraft community hears about this "tv show" and we show a huge support for the channel with great feedback eventually if the E-Sport grown bigger names will catch on. I know a lot of us want E-Sports to be like Korea but realistically it might be 3-10 years before starcraft really catches on.
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Oh lawdy, ESPN? They have NASCAR. Do you really want to be associated with NASCAR?
ESPN is pretty garbage. G4 is pretty bad too, what with all their console-elitism. If anything, Spike is where it's at in my opinion.
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Skim read most of the thread and the thing I'm surprised about is how no-one is suggesting non-american networks. I'm sure for the UK there's a small chance the BBC might run it late night on one of their channels (they also have a global i-player in the works) or maybe even channel 4.
Might not lead anywhere, but it's also worth a shot.
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5003 Posts
On December 04 2010 03:00 Liquid`Tyler wrote:
Someone needs to produce a show that can be presented to ESPN. Asking ESPN to broadcast SC2 is a dead end. You gotta have content for them in the form of something they can broadcast. And then you gotta show that you can get enough people interested in watching that content to justify it to sponsors so you can sell ad space.
If ESPN produces the show, it's gonna sick. People from e-sports need to have a heavy hand in it.
LOL??
yeah they get to pay Blizzard 100K per tournament to broadcast it too, isn't that great :D
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Katowice25012 Posts
Here is a funny story Manifesto once told. [this was long before I was staff I have no idea who he is actually referring to]
For what its worth ESPN at one point played Magic: the Gathering (I have a commercial VHS product of this, its hilarious) and Randy Buehler has very publicly said this was one of the worst decisions they ever made. Their game being horrible for spectating aside, apparently working with them as a non-television entity was a nightmare (thought I've never heard why aside from ESPN being more controlling than they wanted).
Of course it won't hurt to try, best of luck with the initiative!
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I did this just today, I was thinking it would be nice to have GSL air on a TV channel I gain access too. I love this game a lot and would love to see it on TV. I was gonna torrent GSL and stream it to my Xbox just so I could watch it, but it's always in Korean so I can't understand it. I'm learning Chinese because of where I live, it's more practical than Korean for me.
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Any replies yet or steps in the right direction?
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Tbh, if ESPN broadcasts stupid sports like 'HotDog eating contests' then Starcraft 2 will have a chance.
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EPT
