The Call of Duty League 2023 season officially began back on December 2nd. If you are interested in watching the exciting COD action, you can visit the Call of Duty Twitch channel or the Call of Duty website. However, it seems like you can no longer watch CDL matches on YouTube.
Prior to the start of the season, the CDL sent out a tweet on December 1st with the league’s broadcast information. While the 22-second video shows that events will be broadcast on Twitch and the CDL website, YouTube was surprisingly absent from the announcement.
YouTube’s partnership to broadcast Activision-Blizzard’s esports leagues came to an end earlier this year. Sources claim a new deal wasn’t reached between the two sides because of a “general concern over less-than-stellar viewership statistics.” Additionally, sources went on to say that YouTube is “unwilling to put up the money they have in previous years.” As a result, the CDL will not be available on YouTube for the foreseeable future.
The Profit‘s Take:
Clearly, somebody didn’t want to renew this deal. And this relationship has deteriorated so much that Activision-Blizzard is fine with keeping the CDL off of YouTube entirely. It was obvious to just about everyone (at the time the deal was signed) that the media rights were not worth what YouTube paid. But YouTube Gaming leadership was asleep at the wheel. It’s also obvious now that the CDL product didn’t generate massive viewer interest on YouTube. There’s blame on all sides. The YouTube Gaming streaming product is no good. YouTube Gaming overpaid and made a contract renewal at similar levels almost impossible. And Activision Blizzard didn’t put out a product that people wanted to watch. Unfortunately, this is a lose-lose on all fronts, and a loss for the industry as a whole.
(All information was provided by Dot Esports [1,2] and the Call of Duty League)
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