When people think of the beginning of esports in the United States, they think of Major League Gaming. While they clearly deserve the lionshare of credit when it comes to popularizing esports in the United States, their television show on USA network in 2006 was not the first esports broadcast ever. Not in the United States, even.
Without digging super hard the very first esports broadcasts had to be the Ongamenet Starleague in South Korea in 2000. Yeah, six years before Boost Mobile MLG Pro Circuit went on USA Network. Fun fact: this league was cited as the inspiration for Major League Gaming.
But the Boost Mobile MLG Pro Circuit wasn't event the first US esports broadcast, nor was it even the first US esports broadcast in HD. As far as I can tell that honor goes to the 2005 World Cyber Games US Final which was aired on HDNet in November of 2005. Mark Cuban's premium HD cable network had the very first US esports broadcast at 8PM EDT on November 10th, 2005. The World Cyber Games did a lot of firsts and lowkey is very underrated when it comes to its contributions to esports. Of course it was a subsidiarty of Samusung, who is headquarted in South Korea.
Right after that, MTV actually aired the CPL World Tour finals as apart of its "Game0rz" week of programming (I believe they spelled it that way, but I believe contemporaneous coverage also called it Gam0rz). I don't think I found specific airtimes for this and this also included online streaming coverage. The focus of this event was the Painkiller event on PC, which featured Fatal1ty.
I decided to write about this on the off chance someone finds this post while searching for this old obscure events, and they happen to be someone who has footage from them. The Boost Mobile MLG Pro Circuit television broadcasts have been preserved in large part because they were made available on the Xbox 360 Live Marketplace. But the 2005 World Cyber Games US Final HDNet broadcast, or any footage for MTV's Game0rz Week is nowhere to be found. It's crazy to me competitive Halo 2 tournament footage was aired in High Definition in 2005, and I would pay good money to get access to that. So if you or anyone you know has video footage, or any other media relating to these events please reach out to me. Physical media degrades over time, so the sooner the better. My discord info is available below, but if you must use email to contact me you can at this email address that is not my primary one: cyrix dot 1337 at gmail.
Below is a list of early esports broadcasts I've found info on. Some of them you can find copies of but nearly all of them are in very poor quality. In 2006 you weren't capturing or recording high definition video period, let alone with a good encoder at a good bitrate. So what is availabie is in very poor quality and for example even the MTV True Life episode on Tsquared is avaialble via on 300mb file that's like 140p using the terrible codecs of the time.
Did I miss anything? I'm sure I did. Please correct me in my discord channel