Background: origin, characteristics, and classification of e-sports

Cyber sports arise from the regulated, competitive, and professional activity of certain video games that, at first, were only played for leisure and recreation (Hamari & Sjöblom, 2017; Taylor, 2012). In this way, different competitions have been established that are increasingly closer to the dynamics of traditional sports.

Dev (2016) points out that the main video games that are most competed for globally are League of Legends, Dota 2, Counter-Strike, FIFA, or Call of Duty; while in Europe, although these are recurring games, there are regional preferences, such as Counter-Strike in the Nordic countries, Call of Duty in Italy, and in Spain, besides the above, Clash Royale, FIFA, or Hearthstone (Bbva, 2021).

Various authors have studied the relationship between the concept of e-sports and traditional sport, analyzing its most relevant aspects to confirm or deny that both start from the same point.Ontier (2018) indicates that six reasons unite both modalities: (i) there is mainly mental and also physical performance; (ii) participation is organized; (iii) the competitions are regulated; (iv) there is training; (v) they are subject to regulations, and (vi) they are competitive.

With time and the advancement of this discipline, it has been proven that regularly playing video games "improves perception, attention, and spatial cognition" (Bediou et al., 2018, p. 8). E-sports are a type of sport in which people develop and enhance cognitive abilities such as reaction time and decision making; mental skills such as motivation and self-confidence; physical abilities such as strength in the face of fatigue; and the traditional values linked to these practices such as effort and self-improvement (García-Naveira et al., 2018).

Regarding the motivations that lead users to enter the e-sports ecosystem,Fuster, Carbonell, Chamarro, and Oberst (2013) specified that the usual profiles corresponded to curious people, eager to explore and establish new social relationships, since video games bring players closer to a space of experimentation in which they have the possibility of belonging to a group where they feel recognized and get social support and entertainment, which is far from the conception of the solitary player.

When defining the structures under which these athletes are included and compete, most of them are integrated into professional clubs with an organization and disposition similar to conventional organizations. Those are legally constituted with their technical team, management leadership, players, and specific positions that emerge hand in hand with professionalization, as is the case of physical trainers, sports psychologists, nutritionists, or those responsible for marketing and advertising. This is an infrastructure through which they pursue sporting objectives, as well as economic and business performance, which they mainly achieved by broadcasting the competitions.

To classify e-sports, issues such as the role played by physical effort in them, the condition of the spectator, the precedent and historical context, or the degree of interaction are analyzed. Under this model, links are frequently established between e-sports and chess, poker, and traditional sports (Holt, 2016). The development of these disciplines, both in physical and digital spaces, is possible thanks to the media and the information flow, while Taylor (2012, p.14) adds that "e-sports have codified in their own raison d'etre and environment a deep relationship, both in technology and in the media”.

One of the sections that dominate the interests of media researchers concerning e-sports is the study of community creation, live broadcasting, and interaction with streamers (Reitman, Anderson-Coto, Wu, Lee, & Steinkuehler, 2020). The context caused by the confluence of the virtual and physical scenarios has resulted in a point of interest for academics in the sector, who seek to delimit the field of action of both realities.

The organization of e-sports tends to be articulated around specific game genres, such as the case of online multiplayer combat arenas (League of Legends, Dota 2); first-person shooters (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive); real-time strategy (Starcraft 2); trading card games (Hearthstone or Ultimate Team), or sports games (FIFA series). Even so, e-sports are not conceived as electronic versions of conventional sports, even though some, such as soccer, tennis, or baseball, do have representation in games with FIFA or the NHL (Hamari & Sjöblom, 2017).

Taking into account the aforementioned concepts, it is possible to define e-sports as a sports typology in which the main aspects "are facilitated by electronic systems and the entry of players and teams into the scene is mediated by human-computer interfaces” (Hamari, Sjöblom, 2017, p.11). Regarding this definition, the exercise linked to e-sports can be considered, superficially and in general terms, as an activity similar to that of any sport.

The social component of video games is another of the sections that permeate e-sports, in which it has been shown that close relationship with peers is of great importance, just as it happens in conventional modalities. Likewise, e-sports are connected to a live chat that allows the user community to post comments and provide value judgments about the events of the game and encourage the teams and players (Woerman & Kirschener, 2015).

Although the scientific literature that relates e-sports with Public Service Media (PSM) is limited to date, several studies have e-sports as their object of study, as reflected in the previous paragraphs. The same happens with research linked to public service media, of which a prominent bibliography has been completed over the years.

Among the different thematic approaches that lead research on these media, the interest in the concept of public value stands out (Evens & Donders, 2020; Lestón-Huerta, Goyanes, & Mazza, 2021; Rodríguez-Castro & Campos-Freire, 2019), as well as the performance in innovation in public media (Jones & Jones, 2019; Sørensen, 2020), the participation and creation of audiences ( ; López-Cepeda et al., 2019 ) (Lünich, Starke, Marcinkowski, & Dosenovic, 2021), the analysis of governance and independence ( ; Rodriguez- Castro et al., 2021; Kostovska et al., 2021) (Masduki, 2020), or the transformations that public media are undergoing towards platformization (Baldini, Túñez-López, & Báez, 2021; Duffy, Poell, & Nieborg, 2019; Es & Poell, 2020).

In the Spanish context, the area of e-sports has been examined by various research disciplines, and there are still no studies that analyze its presence or development in public media infrastructures. In this way,González and Pérez (2018) approach cybersports from an educational perspective and its relationship with the development of skills. In turn,Dilek (2019) provides an approach from the tourism industry and how e-sports events are a tourist attraction. In this line,Muñoz and Esteban (2021) point to the consolidation of e-sports as a leisure and training market. Other authors analyze the cybersports sector from sociology, based on the analysis of the players (Lárez, 2012) or from the sponsorship capacity offered by e-sports in the sports industry (Cuesta-Valiño, Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, & Loranca-Valle, 2022).

In the following two sections of this article (objectives and methodology) the different purposes that motivated carrying out this study and the mechanisms selected to try to answer the posed research questions are specified.

E-sports coverage on European public television

Once the vertical and horizontal reading of the platforms and digital spaces linked to the selected projects has been carried out, and the interviews have been carried out with Daniel Rodrigues, product manager of RTP Arena, Juha Lahti and Otto Rönkä content producers at Yle eSports, and Simon Engstrand, producer at SVT eSports, the following results are obtained on the structure of the work teams, professional profiles, produced content and formats, distribution channels, and communicative use of their social networks.

Regarding the work templates, the RTP Arena team is made up of 12 professionals who are fully dedicated to the project. Its organization chart is based on a 'product manager', in charge of making editorial decisions and organizing teams, which, in turn, are subdivided into two groups: a first of content creators, with journalistic and digital professional profiles; and another of 6 people in the studio in charge of audiovisual tasks of production, editing, assembly, or directing.

The situation of the other two radio and television stations analyzed is radically different, as is well reflected in Table 6. While Yle has two full-time producers, at SVT there is only one specialized journalist focused on cybersports. Both corporations receive assistance from their sports newsroom, and in the case of Finnish television, there are different journalists with partial ties to the project. Likewise, both RTP and Yle are reinforced with occasional freelance hires that provide them with assistance in massive events.

Source: own elaboration

The contents and formats used in the European public media landscape range from informative news coverage, broadcasts of events and competitions, live broadcasts, magazines, interview programs for players and specialists, as well as fiction formats such as the series ' Gamerne' by Yle, or 'E-sports Saga', by SVT, based on the creation of an e-sports team, which is specified in Table 7.

Source: own elaboration

Regarding distribution channels, the only project that deviates from the main page of radio and television content is RTP Arena (Table 8). The Portuguese corporation is also the only one that allocates space for its linear broadcasts to an e-sports format. Yle gives an entire section of its website to cybersports, while SVT has not yet established a differentiation from the rest of the sports categories.

Source: own elaboration

Rádio e Televisão de Portugal combines its profiles on social networks in a complementary way, without its content competing with each other in the different digital spaces, in such a way that each site offers specific content linked to the characteristics of each tool. The RPT Arena platform offers different types of access to content that are related to each other to offer comprehensive information that is based on its own main web page.

For its part, Yle is in a growth phase where its community is progressively increasing around e-sports content and broadcasts, while SVT reduces the use of its networks -Twitter and Instagram- to a promotional purpose, with hardly any interaction or relevant actions with their followers. The date of creation and the current number of followers of each project in the different social networks is specified in Table 9.

Source: own elaboration

From the mapping of data from social networks, the numbers of RTP Arena stand out compared to the rest of the profiles analyzed, not only in the number of followers in each of these spaces but also in the number of posts, which is notably higher than the rest. On the other hand, taking into account the date of creation of the profiles, a simultaneous origin of all the RTP Arena accounts can be seen around 2016, which contrasts with the sporadic creation of the Twitter profiles in YLE and SVT (2014), from which an incipient interest in this topic is extracted, which is not strategically coordinated with the creation of a community around e-sports.

Based on the results presented in the previous paragraphs, it is possible to affirm that the new communicative scenario structured around cybersports is becoming more and more extensive, becoming a recurrent theme worked in a precise, specialized way, and with ever greater depth, by public television in Europe. Although initially, the productive routines linked to e-sports followed the creation models of conventional sports, a progressive migration towards platforms and social media is identified, with interesting features in terms of technology, interactivity, interconnectivity, and impact on the age group (16-34) wanted by these corporations.

Among the three selected projects, the 'RTP Arena' of the RTP of Portugal is the platform indicated as a reference by the interviewed professionals of the public media in Europe and the only one consolidated as an independent product. This 360º project¹ has its own website and an active presence on social networks, especially on Twitch, where its account dedicated to the game CS:GO -RTP Arena CS:GO²- is the most followed channel in Portugal in absolute terms in the last three years according to the corporation -currently: 182,000 users from the last check-. The other two projects analyzed for their qualitative and quantitative potential, SVT Esports and Yle Esports, present a growing production in breadth and diversity but are integrated as a section within the main web pages of these television stations. The rest of the public television channels such as DR, BBC, France Tv, Rai, or RTVE, among others, timidly began to cover news related to e-sports but without reaching relevant activity as they are isolated pieces.

According to Daniel Rodrigues, product manager of RTP Arena, the origin of cybersports coverage stems from the intention of these corporations to reach and retain young audiences for whom they were unable to be relevant. In the case of Rádio e Televisão de Portugal, they moved their format from e-sports interviews to linear broadcast once a week, which ensure that this audience followed them to conventional television. In this sense, a progressive adaptation of the conversational tone is identified, originally intended for children and their parents, and increasingly focused on avoiding technical redundancies such as the excessive explanation of the dynamics of the games for a specialized audience often made up of the players themselves.

The presence of 'influencers' or familiar faces for users in these countries is projected as one of the main tools for recruitment, search for notoriety, and impact, as can be seen in Figure 3. Active bidirectional interaction and conversation between creators and consumers emerge as a fundamental factor in this new digital scenario, a link that is reinforced when the participants in the formats are professional gaming players or relevant personalities, as is the case of Magisk at RTP Arena, an iconic Danish player from Team Vitality.

Footnote

¹ RTP Arena has its own website that is unrelated to the RTP main website, which is complemented by profiles on social networks such as Twitch, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and broadcasts on its traditional linear television channels.

² RTP Arena has different channels on Twitch: a central one, 'RTP Arena', and several specific secondary ones for certain video games, such as 'RTP Arena CS:GO', or 'RTP Arena FIFA'.

RTP, Yle, and SVT associate their differential proposal of public value with a greater plurality of games used, with coverage of local content and competitions, and with reinforcing national identity by projecting the image of young players, according to the professionals interviewed. The retransmission rights of the main events are already part of the market dynamics of the great sports tournaments, being affordable to date for the budgets of the public broadcasters studied.

They point to the corporations that are in a phase of ideological openness in their internal structure regarding cybersports, increasingly internalized and integrated into their media agenda. This movement is subject to the uncertainty of knowing who will be the professionals in charge of fulfilling the tasks related to e-sports in the future. At the moment, it is the sports journalists themselves who carry them out, with a greater or lesser degree of specialization, which requires the expansion of teams to achieve significant progress.

The televisions assume their role as producers and transmitters of content, but they do not contemplate occupying the point of the chain of organization of great events or competitions. Their work teams are small -12 people in the case of RTP Arena and two and a content producer in Yle and SVT, respectively-, with essentially journalistic profiles that they complement with technical assistance from freelance professionals on the dates that arouse the greatest interest, as is the case of the LoL World Cups (Figure 4).

Source: Marca

The opinion of the professionals interviewed

To explain the reasons that motivated the corporations to start their coverage of e-sports, the producers of the analyzed projects specify two main causes: the irruption of this new sports category on the international scene, and its close relationship with young audiences aged between 16 and 34 years old, far removed from its traditional broadcasts. The public value proposition of each project, as well as the changes they have been making to their routines and the future forecasts they foresee, are reflected in Table 10.

(DR/RTP). “We wanted to start a relationship with this incipient reality that is breaking through. I would say that it has been a success story, both quantitatively, due to the number of users, and qualitatively, due to network fidelity and the migration to linear broadcasts”.

(JL/ Yle) “Each national station has its own strategy, for us, it has always been a challenge to bring together young people. It is clear that the majority are interested in these contents, now they are the engine of transmissions”.

(SE/SVT) "E-sports are here to stay, so we have to push it as much as we can."

Source: own elaboration

Regarding their position as public service media in the context of cybersports, these broadcasters are aware of the search for a differential value from less common formats, such as documentary series, a plural testing of video games, using lesser-known narratives, and reinforcing national identity through the transfer of spaces and programs to local athletes and competitions.

(JL/Yle). “We have thought a lot about what formats to do and what our position here is. We tried the documentary format, little exploited on private platforms, and it was very popular, achieving very good numbers in Finland”.

(OR/Yle). “There are relevant competitions and players in our country, so from our position as a public company, we make sure to give visibility to their talent and effort. We also select a wide catalog of games, with different titles and genres”.

The productive routines of e-sports content have undergone a series of variations since the first broadcasts. On the one hand, the corporations analyzed that the participation of well-known personalities or 'influencers' in the different formats projects the impact of these contents. Likewise, it was necessary to adapt the tone of the conversation to adapt it to its most loyal audience, made up of young people and professionals in the sector.

(JL/Yle). "You need the stars, once you have those familiar faces you ensure a certain impact that would be impossible to achieve without them."

(OR/Yle) “At first, many parents wrote to us thanking us for showing them games that they had never seen before and that were not bad for their children. When they stopped seeing the content, we adapted the tone of the conversation to a more technical language”.

(SE/SVT). "It is essential to set the tone of the conversation correctly, not to explain too much, speak the language of the game, and avoid redundancies."

The decision to locate on third-party platforms, as is the case with the main social networks, led to a debate at the core of corporations between veteran professionals, in favor of hosting content in their own spaces, and content producers, in favor of moving to those environments frequented by the target audience. The technical advantages of media such as Twitch were understood by these television stations as a creative opportunity to improve their content and strengthen the relationship with the audience through co-creation proposals.

(DR/RTP) “Content co-creation was one of the main focuses when we launched RTP Arena. Our analysis is constant to find out what the public needs and what interests them, we reward participation and loyalty with raffles and invitations to our programs”.

(OR/Yle). “Some people with more years in the corporation think that everything should be located in Yle Arena since it is a very popular service. However, our strategy with young people is to move them to the platform they frequent”.

The corporations consider that in the coming years a qualitative specialization in the coverage of e-sports will continue. These advances will be represented in the establishment of new projects or sections, and in the consolidation and expansion of existing work teams. The technical capabilities provided by platforms such as Twitch will then be better known by the professionals linked to them, which will allow them to better exploit these resources, pointing to creativity as the axis of change.

(DR/RTP): “The technology linked to e-sports will multiply its benefits in the coming years, and we will also grow together with it. The greater knowledge of these resources will allow us to be more creative and better apply our ideas”.

(OR/YLE): “I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple of years our team of two e-sports producers was made up of 8/10 pros. The demand is increasing, and we must be there to satisfy it as much as possible”.

(SE/SVT): “We are in the first phase of exploration, but in the organization, we are clear that cybersports will be very important in the future. Everyone at SVT wants coverage to be expanded, but we still don't know who will be in charge."

Descriptive analysis of the platforms

The RTP Arena website concentrates specific information on e-sports in different formats. The high frequency of news publication in the 'Articles' section stands out, with an average of ten daily publications. The 'Videos' section integrates access to the different audiovisual formats of interviews and talk shows created by the platform, while its third space offers analysis and monitoring of the covered e-sports events.

The platform's interest in integrating open and non-invasive organic access to the different social networks to broadcast content stands out. In this sense, the Rádio e Televisão de Portugal cybersports project offers access links to the sessions on Twitch to accompany the specific analysis of the event. Also, they use the YouTube channel as a player for their audiovisual formats, and, in some cases, they redirect to the RTP PLAY player itself.

The representation of e-sports within the YLE platform is offered integrated within a specific section on its main website. The structure is made up of three subsections that give access to various contents of the platform, among which news about the sector, game manuals, interviews with players, a docu- series, and retransmissions of events from the website itself stand out.

The frequency of e-sports news posts on Yle is weekly. Access to content is partial, it is geographically restricted, limiting the broadcast of its docu-series and retransmissions of events, but releasing news related to e-sports. In this sense, the exponential increase in retransmissions from the platform stands out, increasing from an average of 18 retransmissions in 2018 to 58 in 2021.

In the case of SVT, this corporation offers limited access to cybersports content, which invites the use of the platform's internal search engine using terms such as “e-sport” or “e-games”. Even so, the results it projects are limited to the contents highlighted in this analysis. The SVT website limits the viewing of the docu-series but offers access to the contents of its magazine through the YouTube platform.

Source: own elaboration

Descriptive analysis of the main contents

The star content of the Portuguese cybersports project consists of an interview program born in 2016, which besides these conversations, includes gatherings between players and an informative review of the news of the sector. It uses a tone of irreverent humor that is a characteristic symbol of its presenter, Sara Lima. It consists of 6 seasons with a weekly broadcast and a duration of approximately 20 minutes. Its access is open from the RTP Arena platform and its YouTube channel.

Likewise, the fictional e-sports series 'Os players', also produced by RTP, develops a plot centered on a group of friends who form an e-sports team that finally manages to reach a European final. This one-season series with 8 12-minute episodes stands out for its pioneering content, making its exclusive premiere on the RTP Arena platform in December 2016.

Concerning Finnish public television, 'Gamerne' is a documentary series produced in August 2021 that tells the point of view of four Finnish e-sports stars. It focuses on the relationships between the protagonists and the management of professional teams and consists of a season with 12 episodes of 12 minutes each. This documentary stands out for the transversal vision it shows of cybersports in Finland, and it is noteworthy that access to the content is restricted outside the country's territory.

Another content that stands out on Yle is an informative magazine called 'Kiosky Games' in which topics related to e-sports are discussed from a casual and provocative point of view. It premiered in 2019, and since then it has accumulated three seasons with a weekly 10-minute program. Access to the magazine is open from the Yle platform and the program's YouTube channel.

Sweden's SVT they have also produced a documentary series on e-sports, called 'E-sport Saga'. This format narrates the creation of a cyber sports team with non-professional players who achieve success in a Counter-Strike championship. Its premiere is dated December 2021 and consists of a season of 10 20-minute episodes. The documentary portrays the path taken by the players from their position as anonymous gamers to professional life. The Sveriges Television platform does not allow viewing outside of Swedish territory.

The last of the contents selected as the object of analysis is 'Good gaming', an informative magazine on Sweden's public radio and television. The presenters and streamers Ida Ángela and Laura Sipilä lead the program, in which they analyze and test different video games. Acid and provocative humor define the style of a format that, since its premiere in 2019, has completed three seasons with 14 short episodes. Its access is open on the SVT website, as well as on its YouTube profile. The main technical details of each of the selected contents are collected in Table 12.

Source: own elaboration