ESPN Once Turned Sports Into Pop Culture. Will Esports Produce a Media Company Like That?

When Activision Blizzard says it wants to become the ESPN of esports, what is it actually saying?

Thirty-eight years ago, a father and son named Rasmussen gathered twelve local cable operators in the United States and explained to them the idea of a subscription sports channel. If he had been the kind of man who went along with the majority, there might never have been an ESPN. Seven of the twelve thought satellite broadcasting cost too much, and, more to the point, that far too few people watched sports for a whole television network built around it to make any sense.

ESPN today, like cable television itself, is past its golden age, but no one would deny that the marriage of sports and television produced a golden industry. Even now ESPN has about 90 million paying subscriber households in the United States — in a country of 300 million people, that is essentially everyone — and its audience abroad spans more than 200 countries. Even as the television business began sliding under pressure from the internet, live sports were one of the reasons plenty of viewers still stayed in front of the set.

A new ESPN will be born in esports — at least, that is how Activision Blizzard sees it. Bobby Kotick, the company's CEO, said plainly after completing the acquisition of MLG earlier this year: "This acquisition takes us one step further down the road to becoming the ESPN of esports."

MLG (Major League Gaming) is one of the oldest and best-known esports leagues in North America. It was the first to put console games on its schedule, and in 2013 it built MLG.tv, North America's largest video platform devoted to esports. Until this deal, no company that close to esports games themselves had ever swallowed a league of that size.

The latest news is that Activision Blizzard now lets players log into its games — StarCraft and Overwatch, for example — with a Facebook account. Players who do can easily use Facebook's built-in livestreaming to broadcast their own matches, and a new timeline is generated automatically to update your game information.

Activision Blizzard and its games have moved a step closer to the "ordinary" user. Facebook reaches 1.59 billion people worldwide, and if that enormous population can be plugged into esports without friction, esports has a chance of becoming mass entertainment.

Look back to the 1970s, when ESPN was born. People were long used to getting sports news from the established television news networks and the newspapers, and ESPN's founding left most of them a little puzzled: did anyone really need one more outlet devoted to nothing but sports?

Today the esports market looks in much better shape than the sports market of the 1980s did.

According to a report from the research firm Newzoo, in 2015 there were 115 million heavy esports players and 111 million viewers worldwide, growing at double-digit rates; Newzoo predicts that this year the audience aware of esports will pass 1 billion people, and heavy esports players will pass 148 million.

Activision Blizzard Isn't the First Company With This Idea

The mainstreaming of esports looks unavoidable. What is left is how the big companies with money and capability will divide up an ever-larger pie.

Traditional media giants have in fact already moved in: Turner Broadcasting was the first traditional media company to commit fully to esports. This Time Warner subsidiary now owns not only CNN but an esports league of its own: starting this year it will run two ten-week seasons of a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive league.

At the end of April this year, ESL (Electronic Sports League), Europe's most famous esports league, announced the world's first esports channel broadcasting 24 hours a day. Behind ESL stands MTG (Modern Times Group), the well-known Swedish television company, which bought 74% of ESL last June; five months later it also bought DreamHack, one of the biggest esports events in the world.

In January 2016, ESPN finally opened an esports channel — even though a year and a half earlier, ESPN president John Skipper had said that esports was a competition, not a sport.

And unlike the fairly mild competition ESPN faced in the 1980s, today's esports market is close to a brawl. Activision Blizzard does hold advantages over some rivals: it is big, it is rich, it already has a large base of game users, and it has game marketing and sales channels all over the world.

But on the question of becoming an ESPN, it has neither a familiar media platform, as Twitch does, nor distribution channels of its own, as Turner does. Making esports is one thing; making esports media is another. Activision Blizzard may be better at running a league than at getting every match in front of every viewer's eyes.

And at livestreaming alone, Activision Blizzard has less experience than some Chinese companies. Douyu, which raised US$100 million in March this year and caught Tencent's eye, is one of the more conspicuous of China's many game-livestreaming platforms; it claims 150 million monthly active users (a figure that certainly contains a lot of padding), which makes it the country's largest. Behind it come Zhanqi, Huya, Longzhu and a string of others, some flourishing, some nearly finished. After Wang Sicong took his Panda TV into game livestreaming, the business came to look even more like a game of capital: streamers poached at high prices, cash gifts and perks handed out in every form. Money is the entry ticket to this industry and also the source of its disorder.

For these platforms, holding on to their own small patch of ground matters more right now than becoming an ESPN.

ESPN Made Sports "Everywhere." What About Esports?

There is no doubt that the arrival of the traditional media giants is the most important step in bringing esports into the mainstream public view. Just as ESL opened its 24-hour channel to make esports "the most popular sport in the world," these companies with money and capability can use their powerful channels to make esports more popular still — "everywhere," as the phrase goes.

That is ESPN's own creed: to serve sports fans wherever sports are watched, listened to, discussed, debated, read about or played. For ESPN, sports is not only news in a paper; it is radio, television programming, live events and the internet.

After entering satellite television first, in the 1980s, ESPN went on to buy radio rights: ESPN Radio launched in 1992, and three years later the company kept pace with the internet and opened its own official website. That same year ESPN's parent was acquired by Disney, and Disney's offline resources opened up to it: in 1998 a chain of sports-themed restaurants called ESPN Zone opened, full of televisions carrying all sorts of events and even studios for recording television and radio programs. In the same year, ESPN got a magazine of its own.

ESPN moved quickly through the media's shift as well. In 2006 — still the era of feature phones — it was already preloading mobile software onto handsets, now its fastest-growing business. And on Twitter and Vine, ESPN's official accounts remain the most eye-catching clearinghouses for sports news.

Anywhere you can think of, ESPN and its sports news are there. Swap sports for esports, though, and you cannot yet find a single company that has achieved anything on that scale.

This is why Activision Blizzard went looking for a way to buy MLG and to work with Facebook. To become the ESPN of esports, you need very strong media channels to carry your image, your content and your ideas to every user. MLG has media resources built up over years, and Facebook is still one of the largest social communities in the world; together they give Activision Blizzard, a company with little media foundation of its own, at least the basics of media reach.

None of which makes magazines, offline clubs and traditional television any less important. Attracting more viewers and pushing esports further into the mainstream makes the integration of every traditional channel unavoidable. Television programming that never stutters or pixelates still has a reason to exist in the esports era, and some company will end up pulling all of it together: the chairman of Activision Blizzard's esports division, Steve Bornstein, is ESPN's former CEO. ESPN's radio and magazine businesses were born under him, and at Activision Blizzard he should understand better than anyone how important it is to gather esports fans who watch television, go online, read magazines and love being in the arena.

ESPN Turned Sports Into Pop Culture. No One Has Shown They Can Do It Again

Laying out channels is, much of the time, a problem money mostly solves. Just as Activision Blizzard paid US$5.9 billion for King Entertainment, the maker of Candy Crush Saga, simply to add ways of reaching users, it can spend more money to widen its channels. It is working with Facebook now; next time it might be Twitch or Instagram.

That does not guarantee consumers will accept the result. Besides integrating its multimedia channels, ESPN accomplished a great deal in another area: competing for good programming and creating it.

Broadcast rights to the major events have always been the core of the fight among media groups. What ESPN secured — the NBA and the NFL, for instance — are the core assets of American sports; more important still is the original content and programming it built on top of them.

SportsCenter is the example: the most successful and most important sports program ESPN has made since its founding. In its early days ESPN put what few resources it had into this show. Its reporters were always first on the scene with the most expert commentary, and the program ran on rotation across ESPN's channels almost 24 hours a day, so viewers could learn the latest sports news anytime, anywhere. In the United States, the show's anchors hold about the same social standing as a famous talk-show host.

Esports still lacks content of that quality. Everyone is still at the most basic stage: fighting over the events themselves.

Game companies and media groups either buy leagues outright, as Turner and Activision Blizzard have, or run their own events, as Valve and Riot do. Back in China, game-livestreaming platforms, which look more and more like media outlets, are also heating up their competition for broadcast rights: last month Douyu was sued for infringement after capturing footage from inside a game client without authorization and broadcasting it, and was ordered to pay 1.1 million yuan.

Competing for broadcast rights is of course the core of esports media, but as with video sites, once the fight over licensed content grows fierce enough and exclusivity becomes unrealistic, original content will be the way to build a distinct brand and win users over.

In esports, programming means partly a fight over streamers: behind Ruofeng and 09 are not only pork-floss pastries and Taobao shops but users who love their particular styles; and when signing fees climb higher than livestreaming platforms can bear, the platforms will certainly start making programs themselves.

Since last year, China has finally begun turning out esports programs that are not tournaments: Heroes of the World, a League of Legends show modeled on the football program Football World, and Traces of Competition, an interview show, among others. This content is still scattered across separate companies and platforms, but one day an esports channel will appear that wins on content — a channel where, as with ESPN, or with Five Star Sports and CCTV-5 in China, you can find every kind of professional, systematic esports programming, whether news, commentary and analysis, or variety shows.

So, looking back, ESPN's success came not only from the powerful channel network its technological lead made possible, and not only from its ability to make programs. It came from pulling sports scattered across different leagues onto one platform, and pulling fans of those different sports, scattered around the world, onto that platform too. Esports, this young entertainment business, may need a commercial genius to turn the products now held by game developers like Valve and Riot into entertainment properties that can be run on a single platform.

It might be a game company like Activision Blizzard, or a division of some traditional media group; it should be a company with strong negotiating and operating power, able to make esports a mainstream culture in the real sense.

What people can look forward to is this: in another ten years, perhaps, when the people who love esports today have grown up and become the backbone of society, they will be able to sit on the couch and tell their own children the esports stories they once loved most — the way fathers used to explain the NBA to their kids.

One last thing worth mentioning: although the Rasmussens overrode the majority and started ESPN anyway, they were not certain of its prospects either, so they gave it a slightly vague name — the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network — in case sports alone could not carry a cable channel. Few people bother to look into what that name means anymore; ESPN simply means sports. The one lesson it leaves us is this: however large it grows, at bottom it is entertainment.