XLEAGUE.TV

» see xleague.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

XLEAGUE.TV was British at the carriage layer, which is a specific kind of unreachable. The content was Counter-Strike, and Counter-Strike was mine: internet cafes in Turkey between 2002 and 2005, five machines in a row with someone at the counter keeping time. But the way you got this channel was a Sky subscription and channel 291, and no amount of caring about the games gets you a Sky box in Ankara. It was aimed at exactly my interest through a pipe that did not run to my country.

The launch was 16 May 2007. Portland TV, a broadcaster whose other channels were adult subscription services, put a dedicated video game channel on satellite at a moment when the phrase "electronic sports" still needed explaining to anyone over thirty. Programming was built around match coverage from the Electronic Sports League and the United Kingdom eSports Association, wrapped in studio shows: The Match, Games Night, Inside Gaming, eSports Weekly. Guru Larry's Retro Corner ran alongside all of it and is the segment most people who remember the channel actually remember.

The economics were upside down from the first day. Satellite carriage is a fixed monthly cost that does not care about your audience size, and it forces a schedule: 24 hours of programming to fill, whether or not there is a tournament happening. Competitive gaming does not produce 24 hours of content a day. It produces a weekend of matches and then five days of nothing, which television has to paper over with repeats and studio filler.

On 13 February 2008 the channel rebranded as Pulse and moved to Sky 208, keeping XLEAGUE.TV as a branded block inside a wider schedule that also carried MavTV. That is what a channel does when the single-subject bet has not paid. TNWA Group bought it on 6 February 2009 and said it was becoming a production unit making shows for other outlets rather than a channel. The broadcast ended on 1 March.

~ the record ~

~ the timing problem ~

Two years and three months after XLEAGUE.TV went dark, Justin.tv split its gaming category into a separate site called Twitch. The content was not meaningfully different: somebody good at a game, playing it with commentary over the top. What was different was that nobody paid for a satellite transponder and nobody had to fill a schedule. The broadcast started when a match started instead of at eight o'clock because that is when the slot was.

This is the part that makes the channel worth a grave rather than a footnote. XLEAGUE.TV was not wrong about the audience. Roughly the same viewers went on to make Twitch one of the largest video platforms in the world within five years. It was wrong about the delivery, and in broadcasting the delivery is most of the cost.

~ what got buried with it ~

The archive is thin, which is what happens when a product exists as a satellite feed rather than a file. Some of it survives on a YouTube account and in fragments people recorded off their own boxes, but there is no complete record of two years of British competitive gaming coverage, from a period when almost nobody else was covering it at all. Television that is not archived is television that did not happen.

The UK came back to the idea in 2016, when Ginx eSports TV launched on Sky and Virgin as a 24-hour channel. By then the argument had been settled somewhere else and a television channel about competitive gaming was a companion product rather than the main way anyone watched.

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