For the fourth-straight week, the LEC’s main broadcast has averaged more than 100,000 viewers during live broadcasts on Twitch—and there’s no indication that it’ll stop anytime soon.
The main broadcast’s 110,301 average viewers are the best the league has had since week one of the 2021 LEC Spring Split when it had 115,353 across three days of games, according to Twitch statistics website SullyGnome. Every week since the opening weekend has only had two days of games.
The LEC’s year-over-year comparisons have only gotten better as well. With 1.68 million hours watched this past weekend across 15 hours of airtime on the main broadcast, the league is up from 794,559 hours watched for 12.75 hours of airtime last year in week four.
As far as averages go, the LEC’s main channel is up nearly 50,000 viewers from 2020 when it averaged 62,318 in week four.
Alternate-language channels are still giving the league a boost, too. The league has eight alternate language broadcasts in French, Spanish, Polish, German, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Russian.
It’s difficult to pin down exactly what viewership the French broadcast adds to the league’s overall totals because it broadcasts 24/7, as opposed to having separate broadcasts for live events and rebroadcasted material. But all of the other channels combined to generate more than 2.4 million hours watched over the weekend with an average of just over 163,000 viewers.
With a peak of 56,043 on the OPT League Twitch channel, the French-language coverage could be estimated as adding more than 30,000 viewers to that total. That would put the LEC close to, or even higher than, the 200,000 mark.
As the Spring Split starts to push into the middle part of the regular season, fans might expect viewership to slow down slightly.
In 2020, the main LEC channel’s average viewership dropped more than 10,000 from 77,110 in week three to week four. But the broadcast is having no such problem this year, proving that the league must be doing something well.
Games played at this time last year were slightly before COVID-19 was announced as a global pandemic, though. Since that time, viewership across streaming platforms like Twitch has risen rapidly.
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