NRK2, one of the channels of Norwegian Broadcasting is airing the Battlefield 2 final tonight. It’s a rerun from the Scandinavian finals aired on NRK’s web-tv earlier this year. Since everybody is coming with their predictions for 2006, here’s mine:
Live broadcasts of gaming on national tv will be huge in 2006..
Yes, tv channels will air live games, with the top gamers of the world playing. With commentators, experts, statistics and interviews.
There are so many reasons for this:
1) Some of the best customers for advertisers play games: Males in the age 15-45, and lately also lots of woman in the same age. Which will make advertisers wanting to have their advertising around these shows.
2) The quality of the games are so good that “normal” people could watch this and enjoy. I can understand that my dad in the early 80s couldn’t figure out which of the tiny pixelated figures on the screen were us, and which were the bad guys.
But now: HD and glorious surround sound. Xbox 360, highend PCs, PS3 and games like Project Gotham Racing 3 makes this very close to the real world (not quite but close).
Add to that: Amazing replays and camera views you never get in “real life”.
3) The way the games are built fit with the way sports are made today: You have tons of statistics, you have people playing games for a living, and thus becoming very good at it.
There are of course some hurdles too: The geek factor, the quality and the development of new tools to make gaming better for tv.
1) The geek factor. The production I’m watching now is quite geeky. They use looots of special words only known to gamers, and try too little to inform normal people about the concepts of the game. The three guys in the studio are the ones you would playing games everywhere: Guys in t-shirts, not too fit, and 2 of 3 had glasses. Heh! But they knew what they were talking about!
2) The quality. This was lowcost production. Two static cameras and the game. If one produced it like an NBA final or a Champions League final it would something else of course. Lots of cameras, replays of crucial points in the game, experts on all strategy commenting moves (bringing in people from tha army and the air force commenting the game in Battlefield 2 would be cool), live cameras on the gamers gaces as they play, lots of on-screen statistics presented in a readable way. All the data on the gamers screens are made to be watched quite closely to the screen. People are not sitting that close to the tv so it needs to be bigger to be readable for television.
Game servers for broadcasters
3) Special servers. I think the developers of the games will start making special server software just for the tv broadcasts. When NBC airs the world finals in Project Gotham Racing 3, they would like to have access to all views and cameras in the game in their control room. All. So the tv producer can produce this like any normal Indy 500 or Formula 1 race.
Same with Battlefield 2: Several times during the game they missed important things because the guys in the studio happened to be on another camera when it happened. And they didn’t have replays. With special server software for tv companies, they could replay any event in the game, from any angle, not missing a thing.
As for now, this is quite geeky stuff. But still so mainstream that the website of Norwegian Broadcasting almost chrashed during the web-tv transmission. Over 15 000 streams were sent out, and 6 000 unique users were watching it live, making it the most popular live webcast in Norway ever. Even NIX (Norwegian Internet Exchange), the hub of all net traffic in Norway, had problems because of this. See the graph and read about it at NRK.no o (in Norwgian).
(picture by NRK)
The final is still available in NRK’s web-tv here (Windows Media streaming). So have a look and see what you think. How long do you think it takes before a major US or European airs a game live in primetime? My guess, within two years or before.
Related: The best gamers in the world channel