Chinese state media airs show about League of Legends, sees its viewership skyrocket

China’s state-owned CCTV networks aren’t really known for pushing the envelope. And historically, they haven’t been that friendly to games. But as esports becomes more popular in China, even the state media is looking to get in on the action.

Earlier this month, a CCTV-5 show called “The World of Sports” (体育人间) ran a documentary episode about esports that focused primarily on Chinese League of Legends team Royal Club’s performance during the 2013 season (which, as a side note, wasn’t all that great). What came next was quite unexpected.

The episode aired on January 13, and over the next few days, interest in the show absolutely skyrocketed. Its spot on Baidu’s search index — which ranks what Chinese users are most searching for — at one point shot up to more than 42 times its normal position on the index.

The surprising interest in this particular episode shows the power of esports, and League of Legends in particular, in China. As Chinese gaming site 17173 put it: this is no longer a case of games getting a boost from CCTV, it’s CCTV getting a boost from games! And we can probably assume that given the increased interest in the program this episode generated, CCTV and other Chinese stations will be dedicating more time and effort to covering games and esports in the future.

If you can understand Chinese, the League of Legends episode of “The World of Sports” can be watched in full here. (If that link doesn’t work, try another browser; I had trouble getting it to play in Chrome). If you don’t speak Chinese, you can check out this little mini-doc about Royal Club from which the image above is taken: