In-case you weren't aware, Valve held the DotA 2 International 2014 championships this last weekend, with the winning team Newbee taking home the Aegis of Champions and a $5 million+ monetary prize.
However one of the biggest take homes from the event wasn't the matches themselves, but the fact that a lot of it was broadcast on ESPN 3, the sports channels online offering. It also showed a documentary about the game before the tournament on EPSN 2 and the viewer numbers for both channels were very strong.
A source close to the network's executives said they were very happy with the numbers and were definitely looking into broadcasting more eSports content in the future.
"They are in advanced talks to bring that product to both ESPN web properties as well as their TV stations, and they are in the preliminary stages of looking at other games," said the DailyDot's source.
ESPN is set to broadcast Major League Gaming's Call of Duty league next, though that has been a bit of a hassle to get the licensing sorted, so it may not become a regular thing.
There's of course plenty of games that ESPN could look in to showing though. There's Starcraft II, League of Legends and its many other MOBA contemporaries, all the different shooters and Minecraft of course is an obvious choice.
Considering the strength of streaming on platforms like Twitch and Youtube, a TV channel would get itself a nice little audience if it just started showing game streams I'm sure.
