What is Twitch doing to support UK eSports and streamers? We ask Chris Mead (aka MingLee)

Chris Mead Twitch MingLee Interview 1

With some 8.5 million daily viewers, Twitch has grown to become a hugely powerful streaming platform. So how can teams, competitions and streamers get the most coverage from it?
While it doesn’t break up its viewership by region, Twitch has promoted a range of UK events, streamers and eSports tournaments on its homepage in the past – like the ESL UK Premiership League of Legends matches.
In fact, Twitch has a long-running partnership with ESL and has recently extended this.
It has the power to give eSports competitions additional coverage and, ultimately, make them more successful. So how does it decide what to promote on the homepage?
Twitch’s EMEA partnerships director Chris Mead (aka the face of MingLee), told eSports News UK: “The Twitch front page features content curated by a small team with recommendations from many of the staff at large.
“In terms of the type of content, we feature everything from major events to popular broadcasters, some of which is sponsored, a lot of which isn’t. We also have our Spotlight Partner section that’s devoted to up and coming broadcasters who aren’t huge yet, but we feel our community would love.”
So what can Twitch do to specifically help local eSports scenes like UK League of Legends grow?
The ESL UK Prem matches seem to pull in about 500 to 1,000 viewers per match, with a peak of 3,000.
“We already play an active role in supporting grassroots efforts in the UK, both as a broadcasting partner and a sponsor of local established tournaments, all the way through to emerging university leagues and varsity matches,” Mead said.
On the UK eSports/streaming scene, and Twitch’s UK strategy, he added: “There are now many well known partners based in the UK that make up a passionate, thriving community.

“The same can be said of UK eSports, where we’re seeing the emergence of university-focused tournaments, all of which are broadcasting regularly on Twitch. This complements the variety of broadcasts coming from more established eSports leagues.

“The UK is an important territory for Twitch since Europe represents a huge percentage of our userbase. To that end, we are currently staffing up and building out our new UK office to expand our local footprint even more.”

Outside of eSports and game streaming, Twitch has seen success in the past with non-gaming shows like Bob Ross. Mead says Twitch loves how the community has embraced that creative side.

Mead explained: “Twitch’s foray into the creative space was the result of our gaming community doing game related art. We originally created a small channel for those types of broadcasts, but once it was discovered by our broader community, it really took off and was flooded with all types of creative content. The result was creating a dedicated landing page for our creative broadcasters which we launched with the Bob Ross marathon.

“Bob Ross was the original streamer in the sense that he would talk to his viewers as if they were in the room with him. Also, many of our artists cited him as an influence, which made him the perfect fit. We love how our community has embraced Bob Ross since it’s their collective voice that inspired us to bring things like his show to the platform.”

Twitch recently partnered with Vainglory developer Super Evil Megacorp, and Mead is excited about the future of mobile eSports.

“We see great potential for the rise of eSports in the mobile space,” he said.

“There’s a future in mobile eSports without a doubt – and Vainglory is proof of it. With 150 million minutes viewed, it was the fastest growing mobile game on Twitch in 2015.

“When you consider that there are over three billion touchscreen devices and only around 800 million gaming PCs, mobile eSports definitely has the potential to become a leader in the space.”

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Hendrik
Hendrik
7 years ago

Awesome article, thanks for sharing this! Twitch is becoming a major player in the world of e-sports! Well done!