Introduction

The Esports World Cup Foundation was created to accelerate the growth of esports and establish it as the leading global sport. With a potential audience of nearly 3.4 billion gamers worldwide, from casual mobile players to elite competitors, the opportunity is huge. The Esports World Cup was equally huge,  bringing together 25 tournaments across seven weeks, featuring 2,500 participants and more  than 200 clubs from around the world. But the sheer scale of the event quickly revealed a critical challenge: how could the Esports World Cup Foundation manage, organise, and deliver huge volumes of content in a way that enabled storytelling, accessibility, and growth? The Foundation needed a proven Media Asset Management (MAM) partner to centralise its operations.

The Challenge

When he joined the Esports World Cup Foundation, Christian Peer, Media & Strategy Advisor, was surprised to discover that the Foundation lacked any formal content archive or cohesive strategy for distribution and storytelling. Unlike traditional sports, where content scarcity can limit distribution,  esports faces the opposite challenge. “What’s a little bit crazy about esports,” explains Christian Peer, “is that we are operating in a 12-hour long feed environment... We have 12 hours of live [video], which could be on one game title – 20 individual matches or just four matches.”

This unique environment posed multiple problems:

• Editorial and marketing teams (over 200 people) could not access and 
  package content quickly enough to be first on social media
• A global production workforce of 1,600 people, plus 4,000 co-streamers, 
  needed immediate access to highlights to remain competitive
• A lack of consistent file naming made searchability nearly impossible

The Solution

The Media Lobby, powered by Imagen, is the centralised platform that hosts and distributes all live and archived content to the Esports World Cup Foundation’s media partners, rights holders and publishers worldwide.

The partnership was founded on Imagen’s expertise in rapidly deploying high-performance, cloud-based content solutions, enabling the Foundation to build the Media Lobby in a remarkably short two-month time span. As of October 2025, it contained 10,874 records, including 4,911 hours of video 
content, with over 2,000 hours ingested live into the Imagen platform and AWS cloud storage during the Esports World Cup.

Leveraging Imagen’s advanced live ingest capabilities, the Foundation was able to stream all live feeds directly into the platform. This eliminated the previous manual download requirement, allowing instant, global access to content for every club, player, and rights holder. As Peer explains: “All around the world, every club, every player, all our takers had instant access to [our] live content, which really took this whole thing to a new level.”

“All around the world, every club, every player, all our takers had instance access to [our] live content.”

Christian Peer, Media & Strategy Advisor, Esports World Cup Foundation

Results and Benefits

“Our live hours grew drastically as well,” says Peer. “We had 750 million viewers across the globe across those seven weeks and we had over 400 million hours watched on our programs. [The Media Lobby] really helped us to organise it. ” With the Esports Nations Cup launching in 2026, the Esports World Cup Foundation sees Imagen and AWS as critical to sustaining growth and professionalising its esports content operations. It’s the ideal combination of content organisation, powerful search and instant access to live content, all wrapped up in an intuitive, high-end, branded user interface. “If you look at the numbers, esports is as mainstream as it can get,” suggests Christian Peer. “But we are not yet at 
that global recognition, and this is what we’re aiming for… 

We truly believe that Imagen is the right partner, and I think we’ve built something pretty substantial in a two-month time span… Having someone like Imagen that helps us organise all of [our content] and really changes the mindset on how esports operates was pretty phenomenal.”

The success of the Media Lobby demonstrates the critical value of instantly accessible content for live events. Imagen recognises the immense commercial value for clients and their partners when operating in a live sport environment and partnerships are not static. Imagen provides the Esports World Cup Foundation with a future-proof platform, with features and functionality (e.g. enhanced AI-driven metadata and instant clipping workflows) that keep pace with content demands and fuel the Foundation’s competitive advantage.