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ESL launches 24/7 CS:GO streaming service, content to be community controlled

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As rain falls and evaporates and the day cycles to night and back again, Twitch becomes a platform that not only allows for live coverage but continuous broadcasting. Y’know, like TV?

ESL have taken their usual Twitch channel for broadcasting Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and given it a massive playlist of classic games. It will cycle through these, meaning any time you want to watch high-level Counter-Strike from every era of the game, you can. As I write this, there’s a rather intense match of CS 1.6 from 2012 playing.

The service will be interrupted for live broadcasts but will otherwise never stop, technology allowing. The hub for all this is the ESL TV site.

ESL have plans for the service going forward. They’re going to expand it to other games, meaning 24/7 access to StarCraft, League of Legends, Dota 2 and a host of other games, assuming this one is successful. They also plan to integrate a voting system, so that viewers can choose what is watched next from the massive archive. Currently it is maintained by one of their employees, who queues up the videos and ensures the channel is functioning properly.

This is a pretty fantastic idea and I’m surprised Riot, Blizzard and Valve don’t already have something similar for their own games, though it’s possible they don’t all have access to the correct source footage. I’ve followed a similar channel for StarCraft: Brood War, MedryBW, since it launched in 2013. Whenever I need a quick nostalgia hit I head over to it and find some pre-2010 action from the long-gone daddy of professional e-sports.