MASL Flourishes On Twitch
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MATEUSZ SLODKOWSKI/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES
On Sunday, Jan. 15, anyone with a cable subscription had access to a full slate of sports programming, including plenty of men’s and women’s college basketball, NBA and NHL games, the PGA Tour’s Sony Open, a Premier League London derby, tennis’ Australian Open plus the ratings bonanza of three NFL wildcard games.
You’re forgiven, then, if you didn’t realize there was also a mid-season tilt between the league-leading San Diego Sockers and mid-table Kansas City Comets of the Major Arena Soccer League (MASL). It wasn’t on cable—the league doesn’t have a traditional broadcast partner—but the game was watched by 354,000 people on Twitch, a streaming video platform. More people watched that than the Lakers-76ers on NBA TV, the Australian Open and the prime-time Telemundo broadcast of Ravens versus Bengals—all top-50 rated broadcasts that day.