Credit: lolesports/Riot Games
The combination of coverage for the League of Legends Championship Series 
(LCS) and LoL European Championship (LEC) on Riot Games’ Twitch channel helped generate 27.6M hours watched since Jan. 18, up from 23.4M hours watched for the channel during the Spring Split last year.
The primary difference between this year and last year was a staggered opening weekend for each league. In 2018, both the LCS and LEC started play on the same weekend, but this year, the LEC began and ended its Spring Split one week before the LCS, spreading Riot’s coverage out by a week.
Despite only having LEC action to start the year, Riot Games’
Twitch channel posted 2.88M hours watched for its first weekend of competitive play in 2019. The previous year, both LCS and LEC combined drew 2.7M hours watched for the weekend. The boost in viewership came following a rebranding of Riot’s European LoL league and a move towards a franchise-based model.
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Following LEC’s strong opening weekend, The addition of LCS action helped Riot Games’ Twitch channel produce 3.46M hours watched in the LEC’s second week. The figure made Riot’s channel outperform the same week last year for both LCS and LEC action.
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As the Spring Split progressed, year-over-year growth was a trend for the channel with it performing better than it did in 2018 in all but one week. Following the conclusion of the LEC regular season, LCS action on Riot’s channel struggled to match the final weekend of last year in terms of viewership and excitement.
Though this past week’s LCS Spring Split finale included a tiebreaker to determine seeding in the spring playoffs, the playoff picture was much clearer than last season. With five tiebreakers to help determine playoff seeding, the final weekend of action in 2018 propelled viewership on Riot Games’ Twitch channel to 2.9M hours watched. That significantly outperformed the final week of LCS coverage this year which was around 1.6M, due to a lighter number of tiebreakers and no LEC matches to serve as a compliment.
Overall, viewership was up significantly and providing each league with one week to run without the other helped to give Riot Games an extra week of airtime and provide a spotlight for both the LEC and LCS. As each league moves toward its Spring Split playoffs, coverage will return to a more condensed schedule that will have both the LCS and LEC play matches over the same weekends but without matches that overlap allowing fans to watch every contest.
