Esports still needs TV to sustain fan growth despite streaming boom

While pay TV still struggles to grasp the mettle of esports, live streaming of the genre continues to escalate, now accounting for over 10% of all sports viewing in the US, amounting to about 3.3 billion hours over 2019. That is assuming we call esports a sport, which may well be the case soon if the Olympic Games committee allows esports into its books as looks increasingly likely. Unlike some other candidates such as darts and squash, at least esports can claim to have truly global reach with fast growing audiences in almost every region. Indeed, there are signs of saturation among core younger audiences and evidence that esports needs to reach out into new demographics and break through into…