New streaming platform Caffeine has announced a deal with ESL, to bring some esports to the social broadcasting platform.
Live coverage will kick off right away with the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at the Intel® Extreme Masters (IEM) World Championship in Katowice, Poland on March 3-5th, 2018.
The partnership will see the formation of three social broadcasts of ESL content on the Caffeine platform. The first of these will be a live broadcast featuring esports tournaments, the second a 24/7 ‘Greatest Matches’ broadcast, and a 24/7 Highlights broadcast.
Notably, there’ll also be some more interesting unique content in the form of a “Made for Caffeine” esports talk show. This’ll be titled The Magazine, and will premiere later this spring. Each broadcast will use Caffeine’s social and real-time features to look to ‘bring a more personal and friendly experience to live-streamed esports’.
Ben Keighran, CEO of Caffeine stated: “We couldn’t be more thrilled to be working with ESL. We want to bring friends together around the content they love in a casual, friendly way, and what better way to do that then to host the world’s most popular esports gaming company’s content on Caffeine.
“This week, fans from around the world will be able to join each other and tune in to ESL live coverage, with highlights of the best events from this year and previous years following close behind.”
“Caffeine brings a new type of social experience to ESL’s esports content,” said Nik Adams, Senior Vice President, Global Media Rights & Distribution of ESL. “ESL is at the frontier of new streaming concepts and new technologies. One of ESL’s goals is to expand esports to new audiences and the partnership with Caffeine brings us one step closer to our goal.”
The idea behind Caffeine, which launched quite recently after raising a reported $46m (£33.4m), is that users ‘find content based on the people they follow in their social circles and come together to share that content’.
Personal conversations between friends and broadcasters are ‘given preference’, with the point being that this enables more meaningful social engagements while disposing of toxic chatter and endless feeds of meaningless comments.
Since Caffeine is built on its own infrastructure, it will deliver ESL’s content and conversations with no latency, allowing broadcasters to answer questions in real-time and build stronger relationships with their fans. Caffeine was co-founded by an impressive duo of former Product Design Lead for Apple TV and Chomp co-founder Ben Keighran, along with Senior User Experience Designer at Apple, Sam Roberts.
Esports Insider says: Taking on the likes of Twitch at esports is no mean feat but perhaps Caffeine will offer something different. Content such as The Magazine sound like a good way to start, and this arrangement with ESL shows they mean business. Let’s see how they do!