As many of the members of =BFB= are aware, competitive gaming becomes a lifestyle. Much like any other sport, the dizzying heights of a well earned victory to the saddening low's of a bitter defeat. The competitive game is something both fantastic and hidden at the same time. All the emotion, passion and energy that happens during the South African competitions are often hidden away from the prying eyes of the public and the non competitive gamer. In Europe however, things are different. Where they have thousands of teams, and hundreds of servers for every single game you can imagine competitive gaming is become more and more main stream.

As the European's have so many gamers, they are able to support gaming TV channels. In Germany and Sweden there are dedicated channels on Television just for competitive gaming and competitive LAN's. Sweden has a 24 hour CS1.6 channel and in Germany the CS:S and COD4 scenes are simply massive. The one company that runs these channels however is none other than ESL:TV. The Electronic Sports League can only be classified as DoGaming on steroids. They host the leagues, the TV channels, the websites, the ladders and even the LAN's in parts of Eastern Europe. And they are making professional gaming work! As we do not have access to the TV channels, ESL:TV hosts and streams many LAN events live over the internet to your home!

If you are in South Africa and you have a 4meg ADSL connection you can in fact stream these competitions live. If by some miracle you did not know this already, here are the two most popular streaming companies. First and foremost, and by far in the lead of the pack is of course ESL:TV. If you follow the ESL:TV link, you will see the Video On Demand Section for 2009. It is simply flabbergasting. Literally hundreds of VOD's for you to select and watch at you leisure in the comfort of your own home. Following ESL:TV comes QuadV. QuadV was made famous by Call of Duty 4 during 2008 and during the early to middle of 2009 continued to grow. However after August 2008, QuadV stopped covering events and online tournaments and has some what stagnated as of late. In March we will see another fantastic Call of Duty 4 tournament that should kick start QuadV's life span once more.

Be warned however, watching a full hour of QuadV or ESL:TV will eat through your bandwidth. The streams range from 230 - 300kb/s you can use up to 2GB's of information in only a handful of hours. The experience however is worth it, seeing the LAN Parties with thousands of people cheering for a team, and watching the best in Europe playing is something to behold. In case you have not watched a game yet, I suggest putting some bandwidth aside and watching some classic games of COD4, CS1.6, CS:S and Quake Live. Heck they even have some WoW, Supreme Commander 2, Team Fortress 2, Warcraft III, Starcraft, Fifa, Trackmania and if you look really hard you can even see a VOD of a stormtrooper and pikachu playing Wii bowling!

Ask on the forum if you want to watch a specific game!