ESL bans HLTV.org from EPS Nordic

In a move that came as a total surprise and shock to us today, ESL have decided to ban HLTV.org from showing any matches from EPS Nordic III.

For the past two seasons, and for all other ESL events HLTV.org has been doing our complete coverage, we pioneered our Dreamteam game on EPS Nordic season 2, developing it in a rapid pace to get it ready for the league start, we do weekly stats breakdowns and complete coverage of EPS Germany, and cover all other Pro Series leagues ESL provides. Therefore it was of course a big shock to us as we were informed via the ESL page today that we would not be allowed to show EPS Nordic at all.

The move come without any contact to HLTV.org what so ever offering us to compete with Blank-TV on terms or quality, it was simply made behind our back. In this, for us, very weird move all HLTV rights go to Blank-TV, a German HLTV broadcaster that does not even feature an English site, nor any kind of coverage that can match up against our complete package.

ESL puts emphasis on that this deal will ensure them a dependable partner, we can only speculate how more dependable than showing all matches, running all stats, instantly uploading all demos with stats highlights, and even covering the lan finals of ESL Nordic season 1 on-site.

In short however this will not affect you guys at all, what ever motives ESL might have should not hurt our users, so we will keep doing our match pages, keep doing stats, Dreamteam and so forth, but we can sadly not do anything if the HLTV crashes, gets overloaded, and if demos are lost so could vital stats for the stats section and Dreamteam, but this is the position ESL is forcing us into. Livescore will also not be possible as we will not be receiving server information.

We can only ask that you guys, and the teams, let ESL know what you think of this deal, HLTV.org could throw our weight behind a total boycott of the league and their operations, but we honestly do not think that is fair for the thousands of fans out there who wish not to be part of ESLs plan to keep high quality matches away from the public.

HLTV.org will continue to work with ESL on the other leagues, we understand that EPS Nordic runs of a license holder, and thus is not under direct control by Turtle Entertainment, the company that owns the ESL brand.