Fans demanded and Riot Games listened. After expanding LCS’ co-streaming for 2023, the LEC also enabled it—but only for Spanish-speaking channels.
The LEC officially partnered with KOI and Team Heretics today to enable co-streams from Jan. 21 to Feb. 20.
While Spanish-speaking fans will be able to watch matches on Team Heretics’ official channel, streamer Ibai will spearhead Koi’s content as co-founder of the organization. Both channels are likely to attract a large audience.
Ibai has garnered an average audience of 100,000 viewers over the last last seven days, and those numbers are likely to grow during Koi’s first-ever matches in the LEC.
This co-stream deal encompasses the whole winter season and group phase. The winter playoffs won’t be able to be co-streamed, however, since they’ll start when the deal’s duration expires.
Related: Dot Esports’ LEC 2023 Winter Split power rankings
“We will be monitoring the roll out and success of these co-streams closely,” Riot said. “Provided the co-streams are successful, we’ll certainly be open to expanding the program to include more LEC team co-streams in different languages in the future.”
The next languages could include French, through Team Vitality and BDS, as well as Danish with Astralis, and German with SK Gaming. But it’s unlikely co-stream are expanded to English-speaking channels.
In the 2022 LEC Summer Split, the LEC’s Spanish broadcast garnered the most simultaneous viewers behind the English stream (with a peak of over 80,000), according to Esports Charts.
That being said, the 2022 LEC Summer Split was one of the worst-performing splits in terms of general audience due to a gradual decline in numbers since 2020.
This might have motivated the recent LEC format changes, as well as the decision to open co-cast to a local language during the regular season.
The 2023 LEC Winter Season will kick off on Jan. 21 at 11am CT when G2 Esports face off against Excel.
