In June of last year, Netherlands-based esports organization Team Liquid announced a partnership with the Chinese streaming service HUYA. For the first time, Team Liquid players’ livestreams were to be available live for Chinese audiences thanks to a service called Restream.io that allows live Twitch streams to be broadcast onto other platforms with a six second delay. Now Team Liquid and HUYA have announced that the partnership has been expanded into a multi-year deal, lasting at least until the year 2022.

The initial deal between HUYA and Team Liquid encompassed players from its League of Legends, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Apex Legends and Hearthstone rosters. In addition to HUYA hosting streams for Team Liquid’s players from across its esports teams, League of Legends star DoubleLift’s HUYA streams began to include live translation into Mandarin.

In total, the renewed agreement includes 22 players from across Team Liquid’s range of esports teams, all of whose streams will now be broadcast in China through HUYA. Some of those players will be broadcast live in front of a Chinese audience for the very first time.

This announcement comes in the wake of prior deals between the Chinese streaming company and Western esports teams. In January of this year, Riot games announced that HUYA would host the official broadcasts of LCS (North Americna) and LEC (European) matches for the Chinese regio. HUYA was already the official source for broadcasts of LCK (Korean) matches for the region. Just last month, the European Team Secret announced a similar deal to Team Liquid’s, including a multi-year streaming agreement for its roster of players.

During the first year of the Team Liquid deal, its players streamed for an amount of time just exceeding 4,100 hours. At one point PUBG player ibiza’s HUYA stream peaked at 2.8 million viewers, earning him hundreds of thousands of new followers and a fan vote victory as the platform’s most popular foreign streamer. Mike Milanov, who is the COO of Team Liquid, expressed that the first year of their partnership allowed them to navigate the competitive and growing Chinese market, and that he hopes the ensuing years of the deal will help Team Liquid players expand their existing audience and welcome new fans.

Source: Esports Insider