As I wrote about last week, E-League premiered last Friday after a week that saw a PR blitz and repeated commercials for it during the NBA finals. It was to be the first time that esports was to be regularly shown on traditional TV/Cable and the eyes of many of cable channels were watching, ready to launch their own series should E-League be able to capture the elusive unplugged millennial viewers.

So how did E-League do?

Its looking pretty grim. E-League brought in just over a half million viewers (509,000 viewers on TBS with an additional 92,000 viewers from Twitch at the peak). Those numbers aren’t terrible in themselves. CS:GO saw about 1 million concurrent users for the ESL CS:GO finals, so only seeing a 50% loss when attempting to get the series started on a medium that is traditional shunned by the average viewer isn’t terrible.

Unfortunately, the viewership numbers paint a very different picture when compared to the numbers from previous weeks. E-League’s time slot used to be filled by Big Bang Theory re-runs and when you compare the numbers, you find that E-League’s viewership is only about 33% of what Big Bang Theory was pulling in.

Still hope?

Despite the drop in viewership numbers, TBS is likely to continue airing the series for its entirety. 8pm to 11pm is known as the Friday Night Death Slot and traditionally sees terrible viewership numbers. This keeps the overall risk for TBS pretty low and should they need to to replace E-League eventually, they can simply refill the spot with re-runs again and not have to worry about a ramp up time for producing a new show. The overall cost of their esports gamble has been negligible.

Additionally, the viewership numbers for E-League are significantly higher than esports has seen in the past. For example, the Heroes of the Storm collegiate championship Heroes of the Dorm received a Neilson rating of 0.1 and received a fair amount of buzz from press and fans/haters. E-League more than doubled that number, receiving a 0.21 rating, showing that there is a trend toward some viewing esports on cable. The real question for TBS is how they can speed up that trend.

With an estimated 40+ million viewers, esports is a huge opportunity for the company that can figure out how to get people to turn away from their streams and tune back into cable. The majority of those viewers are millennials, an audience that TV/Cable have been desperate to court in order to survive, so TBS has little choice but to continue to try and make E-League work, siphoning off some of the online viewership and building a decent Neilson rating as a result.