Here’s a report about a live broadcast of an event from the mulltiplayer online game World of Warcraft. 4,000 people are expected to watch a team of players perform a raid within the game world, an event that will take three to four hours.
Something like this really taking off depends of course on the games themselves becoming even more mainstream, which is certainly possible. And even if not many people would watch something that long, I can see highlights being popular if there’s enough of an audience who appreciate the skills of what they’re watching. Given how fragmented mainstream TV viewing is these days how popular would something like this need to be before it counted as “popular” anyway? (Found via Wonderland.)