YouTube gets exclusive broadcasting rights to official tournaments Activision games

YouTube has signed an agreement with game publisher Activision Blizzard: the video platform will receive the exclusive live streaming rights of e-sports tournaments from the publisher. Games that fall under it are Overwatch, Call of Duty, Hearthstone and more.

The agreement will last “several years” and has an immediate effect: on Friday the new tournament season of Call of Duty started, which can therefore be found on YouTube. The 2019 season of Call of Duty can still be found on both competitor and Amazon subsidiary Twitch and on YouTube, but that duality has now come to an end. Until now, the exclusive rights to the Overwatch League were held by Twitch, which reportedly paid $90 million for two years of exclusivity. It is unknown what Google will pay for this agreement.

In addition to providing an exclusive platform in the form of YouTube, Google will provide cloud services to Activision Blizzard. That mainly means that Google will house the game servers, but also talk about “optimum personalized interactions thanks to Google’s cloud-ai, which can make tailor-made recommendations for in-game purchases”.

The broadcasting rights are valid worldwide, with the exception of China. How the exclusivity is there now is not stated in the announcement. In addition to the Call of Duty League, the Overwatch League starts on February 8.

The game streaming market is fiercely competitive. Google has been trying to gain market share with YouTube Gaming for some time, which started as a separate part but has now become a section within YouTube itself. Microsoft also wants a share and paid the popular Twitch streamer Ninja for a switch to Microsoft’s Mixer.