At the center of this collaboration was a clear goal: elevate the eSports viewing experience by turning competitive gaming from isolated livestream moments into a true 24/7 entertainment ecosystem. Instead of relying on traditional streams tied to platforms like Twitch, Mirage Digital built an always-on destination that now lives across major OTT and FAST platforms worldwide.
Using Mirage's experience in monetization, redistribution, licensing, and multi-platform syndication, the team created a pipeline that transforms competitive play, behind-the-scenes access, creator stories, highlights, and major event coverage into one cohesive global distribution strategy.
In partnership with Team Liquid, one of the most influential groups in eSports, the first major milestone is the launch of a dedicated FAST channel on July 22, 2025. Its debut centers on live coverage of World of Warcraft’s Race to World First, supported by a broader slate that includes player features, real-time analysis, daily highlights, and exclusive behind-the-scenes content that brings viewers closer to the action.
The vision extends far beyond a single launch. This partnership aims to set a new standard for how eSports is produced, programmed, and distributed by making high-quality content accessible to both core fans and new audiences. By moving past platform limitations and tapping into FAST’s global reach, Mirage and Team Liquid are opening new revenue opportunities for creators and organizations while reshaping the long-term sustainability of competitive gaming entertainment.
This launch marks the first step in building a continuous, premium eSports experience that expands audiences, strengthens fan engagement, and redefines digital sports broadcasting.
To bring Race to World First (RWF) to Roku, Mirage didn’t just broadcast an event. We redefined how a high-intensity esports race could exist on television. Our approach combined rights negotiation, content engineering, and real-time broadcast production in a way no other esports organization had attempted, creating a truly first-of-its-kind viewer experience. From the outset, we challenged the assumption that RWF had to remain confined to Twitch. Instead of restreaming gameplay, we built a bespoke, end-to-end distribution and content-transformation system designed for FAST and OTT platforms.
This required more than formatting. It meant rethinking the narrative structure so Team Liquid, the world’s highest-earning esports team, could appear on TV with the same clarity, pacing, and storytelling polish as a major sports franchise. Our hybrid broadcast model fused real-time ingest with an adaptive production layer capable of shaping dozens of simultaneous POV feeds into coherent, episodic television while the event was still unfolding. Editorial logic inspired by traditional sports allowed us to tag and highlight key moments such as progression milestones, boss attempts, lead changes, and clutch recoveries, turning complex raid mechanics into universally engaging drama.
Mirage pioneered a redistribution framework that had never existed for RWF. Instead of a single-stream event, we created a three-tier syndication model: a 24/7 FAST channel for Roku, transforming a multi-day race into an always-on destination; a highlights and recap ecosystem for casual viewers; and a structured VOD library that allowed audiences to follow Team Liquid’s journey like a serialized competition series. Each version was optimized for Roku’s discovery surfaces, maximizing reach, retention, and monetization.
On the execution side, Mirage built a custom broadcast pipeline capable of handling unpredictable, multi-day gameplay. Automated systems managed live transcoding, metadata mapping, chapter creation, camera prioritization, and dynamic ad insertion, ensuring feeds remained stable and TV-compliant. Balancing authenticity with accessibility was critical. Hardcore fans expect purity and transparency, while mainstream audiences need structure and context. Mirage bridged this gap with adaptive commentary, simplified visual framing, and a storytelling layer that elevated the competition without compromising Team Liquid’s integrity.
The result was groundbreaking. This was the first television-native version of Race to World First. Mirage transformed one of gaming’s most complex competitive events into a polished, premium entertainment product on Roku, bringing Team Liquid’s world-class gameplay to millions of screens and establishing a new benchmark for how esports can be experienced on the biggest screens in the home.
Our main goal was to make Team Liquid’s Race to the World First coverage easier to find and watch by bringing it to Roku’s huge OTT audience, and the results really backed that up. Reaching about 480,000 unique viewers showed that we weren’t just hitting the core esports crowd; we were successfully breaking into a much wider, more diverse audience. That was a big milestone in proving that RWF content can live and thrive on mainstream streaming platforms.
We also wanted people to genuinely engage with the broadcast, not just drop in and bounce. The 1.3 million watch minutes made it clear that viewers were sticking around, which told us the content was landing the way we hoped. And seeing daily engagement peak at 338,000 viewers showed that interest stayed strong throughout the entire event window.
On top of that, running a full-day schedule from 10 AM to 7 PM PST helped us recreate the real-time energy of the Race to World First and ensured fans could jump in whenever they wanted.
All together, these results confirmed that our approach worked, we expanded the audience, kept them engaged, and proved that esports events can perform incredibly well in broader OTT environments. It sets us up perfectly for even bigger opportunities moving forward.
