It’s been another busy week in and around esports. The most notable news comes around Maestro, with $3,000,000 (£2.2m) in funding raised, ELEAGUE and its new viewer experience enhancing technology, Gillette adding TSM to its team portfolio and DreamHack aligning its sanction rules in line with ESIC.
Maestro notches $3,000,000 in Series A financing
Maestro, the engagement and analytics platform for enterprise live streamers, has just announced the close of a $3 million (£2.2m) Series A financing.
The round was led by Hersh Interactive Group with additional investors Rubicon Venture Capital (an investor in Unikrn) and the Stanford-StartX Fund. This brings the total capital raised by the company to $5.8m (£4.4m).
Ari Evans, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Maestro, said: “As sophistication around streaming becomes the norm, the new metrics revolve around quality of interaction, retention, and attribution to the bottom line. We’re excited to enable businesses around the world to create robust, long-term live streaming strategies through their own destinations.”
Discussing their plans for esports specifically, Evans told Esports Insider: “As we spend more time with enterprise live streamers, we increasingly discover how underserved they are in the market. We have had the privilege of watching our customers adopt new live streaming strategies with our platform, fueling our spirit of continued innovation to drive new value to our growing ecosystem.
Read the full article here.
Gillette add TSM to esports portfolio
Gillette has partnered with TSM, in the company’s second team sponsorship of late.
We're proud to welcome @TeamSoloMid to our global roster of all-star athletes. pic.twitter.com/kw9YK11Adl
— Gillette (@Gillette) September 1, 2017
The world-renowned shaving brand entered into a partnership with EDward Gaming (“EDG”) back in May after adding Enrique Cedeño Martínez, also known as “xPeke” as a Gillette ambassador back in January. Now, it has added Team SoloMid to the fray just before they were in action at the North American League of Legends Championship Series Finals where the team beat Immortals by three games to one to make it three titles on the bounce.
xPeke joined the likes of Neymar Junior, Antoine Griezmann and Rodger Federer as Gillette sponsored athletes and now TSM join a club portfolio including footballing giants FC Barcelona and the NFL franchise New England Patriots.
Read the full article here.
DreamHack align to ESIC recommendations
DreamHack has announced that with immediate effect, it will be following ESIC’s recent recommendations with regards to sanctions for various integrity breaches.
It follows on from ESL’s decision to do the same after ESIC’s results from a 7,500+ fan survey saw them revise and realign their sanctions in line with what should be expected. Notably, it saw notorious Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team iBP unbanned after a match fixing scandal which saw Valve ban them for life. It’s worth noting that they are only unbanned from ESL and DreamHack events, and that Valve have yet to budge on their lifetime ban from Valve events.
DreamHack has been a member of ESIC for a considerable while now, so many found it confusing when they didn’t take the same stance as ESL initially but it’s not taken too long for them to follow suit. They have aligned their sanctions surrounding Cheating, Match-Fixing, Doping and Competition Manipulation.
Read the full article here.
ELEAGUE working with DELL, SLIVER.tv and DOJO to enhance fan experience
ELEAGUE, the esports brand from Turner Sports and IMG, has announced they’re set to engage “a collection of cutting-edge technologies” to enhance the upcoming CS:GO Premier. The tournament which kicks off September 8th, is set to work with a number of companies to provide new ways of viewing the tournament.
First, in partnership with their official PC Hardware provider Dell Gaming, they’re set to be bringing biometric analysis to fans. Using eye-tracking technology developed by Tobii, they’re set to be collecting data thanks to the micro projectors and sensors, to show the situational awareness and reaction times to show the audience how players operate at the top level of competition. Video examples of this in operation are available here.
Next up is virtual reality brought in from SLIVER.tv, a company already providing services to ESL and DreamHack in CS:GO. Taking the same technology from there, SLIVER allows the VR viewer to watch the game from any point in the map, as well as watching the standard audience stream as if you’re in the game.
Read the full article here.