Will E-Sports Ever Work on TV?

Spend a day at the 10,000-square-foot Atlanta studio that Turner Sports built to house its new competitive video gaming show, eLeague, and you’ll come away convinced that e-sports are a legitimate activity with legitimate fans and the potential for a legitimate market share of the TV-sports universe. You know who isn’t convinced? The camerapeople. They’re used to covering live athletics in which players, you know, move. One of them jokes in the bathroom, “S---, I could go on the roof and have a cigarette, and no one would notice.”

This has long been the dilemma of bringing e-sports to television: How do you make an entertaining program out of people sitting in one place for hours at a time? The trick, says Craig Barry, Turner Sports’ chief content officer, is less about getting e-sports going than moving out of its way. “This is a community that already exists,” he says. “We want to help expand it, not fix it.” With a three-hour showcase broadcast every Friday night on TBS (and about four hours of daily streaming on online gaming broadcaster Twitch Interactive), eLeague is the highest-profile corporate plunge into competitive gaming to date.