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This is interesting. The president of ESPN has weighed in on the sport/not-a-sport argument regarding eSports. His verdict? Not.
"It's not a sport — it's a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition," John Skipper said Thursday at the Code/Media Series: New York conference, sponsored by re/code. Skipper had been asked to comment on Amazon's $1 billion acquisition of Twitch.
His network sang a different tune in July, when it teamed up with Valve to broadcast The International 2014, the world championship of Dota 2. The Grand Finals were broadcast live on ESPN3, which is an online streaming service, not a television broadcast network.
Still, Skipper's dismissal of eSports as a competition is intriguing, considering his network's history of broadcasting poker tournaments, abandoning the National Hockey League, and practically avoiding any mention of it on SportsCenter.
