NEW YORK — Turner president David Levy told the story Tuesday of how he first came across eSports.
Levy recalled at Leaders’ Sport Business Summit that a few years ago, he knocked on the door of the room of one of his son’s only to find that he didn’t answer because he was wearing headphones while watching competitive gaming on the computer. Levy tapped his son on the shoulder and asked what he was doing. Told it was Twitch, Levy proceeded to ask what that was.
“I go, ‘Wait a minute. You’re watching someone else play a video game?'” Levy said. “He goes, ‘You played hockey, you go to the (New York) Ranger games, you watch the greatest people in the world play hockey. I’m watching the greatest people in the world play what I like to play.’ And I went, ‘Wow. That’s interesting.’
“So I said, ‘Keep going. I’m just going to sit here.’ And I watched for 45 minutes. I sat behind him, and his reactions, when something was good, he was like, ‘Oh my god!’ He was screaming backwards, and he was excited while he was watching this video game. And so it caught my attention that this was a real thing.
“I came back to the office and asked my strategic planning people to do a deep dive on what this eSport thing is. And a month later, I got a stack of things of what was going on. It’s huge. Fifty million people in the United States play eSports. It’s a global phenomenon. Eighteen to 34 (demographic), there’s more money spent in this thing, growing like a weed. And so we knew we needed to get in.”
Levy’s aha moment helped lead to Turner’s September 2015 announcement that it was partnering with WME/IMG to create what would become known as ELEAGUE. The deal got Turner ahead of the curve and gave eSports additional notoriety with coverage on TBS on Friday nights in addition to TBS digital platforms.
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People watching people play video games is big business for Turner. It reported last July that ELEAGUE had 897 million gross minutes of video consumption on TBS and Twitch and attracted more than 3.4 million new viewers to TBS during its inaugural 10-week season. ELEAGUE telecasts in the first season led to TBS’ coveted Men 18-34 demographic growing 97 percent compared with the same telecast window over the previous month.
Levy said when ELEAGUE draws a 0.3 rating, that compares to a regular season baseball game, MLS game or NHL game.
“Within one year, we’re already matching some of the sports that have been airing for years and years and years,” Levy said.
Levy isn’t the only Turner executive who has turned to his son for an understanding of eSports.
“In my own family, I’ve got a nine-year-old that this is the only thing he really cares about,” Turner chairman and CEO John Martin told Bloomberg in January. “He’s looking at these gamers, and they’re athletes. And so while it maybe in some respects hard for me to necessarily recognize them as athletes because they’re playing video games, these are athletes. And these are people that my son looks up to. He follows their personalities. And he is spending a tremendous amount of time not only on digital platforms, but now increasingly on TBS following how these sports tournaments are evolving.”
David Levy – eSports are here to stay https://t.co/DFvBstTvWR
— LEADERS Business (@LeadersBiz) March 21, 2017