My Assistant
E: Did this come out of any pre-existing information about esports? Were people at CNCTV watching what Blizzard was doing with StarCraft in Korea?
J: Oh yeah!
E: This seems like such a long way back before even Riot, the current experts in esports, had figured out how to do all of the broadcasting in-house.
J: EA was seeking the same goal that Riot was seeking. This was when Defense of the Ancients had exploded, and people loved it. We knew StarCraft had been successful for years, dominating on Korean TV. There had been all this talk about Twitch and things like this coming up in the future. Those things were starting to happen and they were really exciting. People at EA who were paying close attention thought, "Jeez, we can get in on this." It was tough though for a game team to roll it's own show. That wasn't something that anyone else was doing. But it was in the spirit of where Twitch is now. It was the exact same origin.
Source: Zam.com