ESL Twitch exclusivity deal concludes

ESL will no longer be exclusively streaming on Twitch as their three-year exclusivity deal finally concludes. Games will now be streamed on both Youtube and Twitch, the tournament organizer has announced.

ESL and Dreamhack penned the agreement with Twitch in April 2020, with the streams being non-exclusive in 2020. Then the deal limited all English-language broadcasts to Twitch in 2021 and 2022. The company had previously signed exclusivity deals with Facebook and YouTube in the past. Both deals came under heavy criticism from the community.

Back in 2018, ESL's agreement with Facebook put ESL Pro Leagues and all ESL One events exclusively on the under-developed and feature-lacking Facebook live-streaming service. The move was met with immense backlash and eventually forced the TO to renegotiate going into 2019. YouTube provided better competition than Twitch's dominance. But the community resistance to switching away from their lovely pogchamp-filled chats eventually led to the eventual Twitch exclusivity deal.

In the two years since that exclusivity was activated, more TOs have started streaming on both platforms. BLAST and PGL both run their biggest events, including majors, multiplatform. And the community that was once vehemently opposed to YouTube has now switched its position and wants the pause, and rewind features over the chat emotes.

Luckily for fans, with the expiration of the Twitch exclusivity deal, ESL is now following suit. ESL events will be streamed simultaneously on YouTube and Twitch, this includes IEMs, ESL Pro League events, and other events like the ESL National Championships.

The announcement comes right before the start of IEM Katowice's Play-Ins, which kick off on Wednesday. Follow the action of both the A and B streams on YouTube and Twitch.

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