Co-streaming: From a Community-Driven Audiovisual Format to a New Consumption Channel in Esports

The co-streaming technique is emerging as a new form of digital consumption in e-sports. Its latest major appearance corresponds to the development of the technique in the League of Legends World Cup 2022, through different content creators selected by language. In fact, its importance is beginning to expand to other entertainment industries such as in the premiere of the animated series ‘Arcane’, or in the audiovisual exploitation of the novel and media phenomenon of the ‘Kings League’. The positioning of content creators as a key figure in simultaneous and parallel retransmissions to the main ones, has become a strategy for generating and exploiting audiences. Given its success and expansion, this article aims to relate this novel form of consumption with its first manifestations, which had been developed with a community character and which were produced in a rudimentary way, without showing images and only providing synchronization tools to the community of viewers. In this way, a concrete classification of these manifestations can be established, in order to delimit, differentiate and rename the co-streaming phenomenon.