Last week was the first week of Eleague, the $1.2 million Counter-Strike league hosted by US TV network TBS. Following the first week of play, TBS has put out a press release detailing the viewership of the league's debut.
Matches in Eleague are broadcast on Twitch Tuesday to Thursday, while the playoff final of each group is played on Friday evening during primetime - and broadcast on TBS. The Eleague press release says that the TV broadcast averaged a total of 509,000 viewers, which we take to mean how a little over half a million people tuned in (what's an average total viewership of a single TV broadcast, anyway?)
The preceeding Twitch streams peaked at 92,000 concurrent viewers, and all the group games had a total of 4,3 million stream starts - meaning that's how many times somebody opened up the Eleague's Twitch channel during their shows.
As for the match results, Luminosity Gaming unsurprisingly won the group. They went undefeated through the round-robin stage, beat Team Liquid 2-0 in the group semifinals, and defeated Cloud9 2-1 in the group finals.
That puts Luminosity in the Eleague playoffs, while Cloud9 head to the last chance qualifiers, giving them an outside shot at making it to the playoffs as well.
The Eleague continues this week with Group B. It features Ninjas in Pyjamas, G2 Esports, Selfless Gaming and OpTic Gaming.
Luminosity move on from group A of the Eleague.