Why you should consider using heart rate in your esports broadcasts:
It has already been tested by conventional sports events (even at the 2020 Olympics) and showed good results.
Numbers and statistics are great for sports and games alike. People love to compare stats.
It will help the broadcasts better convey the challenges players face and their reactions to them, allow for a deeper understanding of the game by people who haven’t experienced it themselves and a closer connection for seasoned viewers.
Heart rate stats and replays provide more incentives to actively watch through sponsor segments.
It is easy to implement and will be comfortable for players.
It provides more grounds for fitness companies to look into sponsoring esports events.
It will be a good addition to the conversation around the events.
Why do it with Pulsoid:
Pulsoid has more than 5 years of experience working with heart rate showcasing for streamers. Gaming, Twitch and broadcasts in general are our specialities.
Our service is fast and easy to set up.
It is highly configurable and customizable.
It can be used with third party services (IFTTT and more).
It can be used for analytics.
We want to make our service better fit the esports paradigm and ready to work for it.
If you want Pulsoid to be a part of your esports event hit us up on Twitter or support@pulsoid.net
Last few years have been a tough period for many sports tournaments and social events alike yet esports continue to persevere and flourish even in this environment. The US esports audience grows rapidly and is about to account for more than a half gaming related views by 2023. Worldwide esports audience has surpassed 450 million viewers and isn’t stopping anytime soon. It is an industry driven by enthusiasm, unity and genuine love for gaming. Esport athletes and their fans were moving this industry forward together with the most dedicated believers becoming tournament creators, producers and commentators. But today with it becoming the new mainstream there are more reasons and possibilities for innovation than ever. Esports has always been closely intertwined with technological innovations by its nature and it is truly an industry that should set an example for how to turn an intense competition into an equally riveting show. Showcasing players’ heart rates and heart rate analytics may be one of the ways to do so.
Displaying athletes’ heart rate isn’t something unheard of either. Some conventional sports broadcasts have already dabbled into this practice recently. Heart rate graphics were featured for the first time at the Olympic Games this year to great success. Many of the viewers were amazed by how high those values can get for a seemingly static sport. See where we are going here? Heart rate widgets are also a major part of the PGA Tour’s overlay for professional golf events. This allowed for new sponsorship opportunities for the organisation and a better understanding of the inner turmoil of each player. It is a time for early adopters to set the trends of future sports data visualisation and collect most benefits from this integration.
Source: WorldArchery
The thing is, people love numbers and sport is all about numbers: how high one can jump, how many seconds to finish the lap, who is the first... You name it. And gamers love numbers twice as much. What is the average time to kill in the new release? How good is the player’s KDA? How much damage does someone do or heal? These are the genuine questions we ask and want to know the answers to. That is why there are so many apps that help you gather your data and compare it to the leading esports athletes’ in the game. It seems neglectful to overlook this fascination. There’s so much use for this statistics in the industry so why lose it.
Pro View is an example of an esports subscription service that aims both to show some additional statistics and to give viewers a closer connection with a pro player
In addition to this, while esports events are rapidly growing their audiences, it’s mainly due to the gaming community expansion in general. The more people are invested in the particular title the more will eventually take an interest in esport events related to it. But what about those who haven’t immersed themselves in the game’s fan base but may be curious about it? Or even more than that, what about people who aren’t that much into gaming themselves but would potentially have a great time watching others play on a professional level? After all, not every hockey fan owns a hockey stick or even knows how to skate. Getting those people’s attention might be an ambitious task in the least but in my opinion a crucial one for this industry to develop.
Many competitions are easy for a newcomer to understand and form a second hand visceral feeling of. Runners pushing their limits while sprinting as fast as they can, sweat dripping from their face - we may not be professional athletes but we certainly can imagine how it feels. It is definitely harder with more static or unusual activities. What is it like to drive in NASCAR? How does it feel to partake in the Chess Olympiad? What is it like to be left one in five in a CS:GO round or to ace a whole enemy team in League of Legends? All these experiences are the products of people performing on the edge of their capabilities yet it may not be apparent from the outside. With the overwhelming popularity of shows like Arcane, the percentage of casual viewers of esport tournaments is destined to grow with many of them never experiencing these situations first hand. Addition of heart rate widgets and statistics is a great way to conduct the inner turmoil of players. It can help not only to legitimise the seriousness of these events (if it is still needed) but also make even experienced audience members feel a deeper connection with their favorite team members.
Viewers retention and engagement maintenance would greatly benefit from the introduction of heart rate data to the broadcasts as well. Commercial breaks and sponsor shout-outs is what fuels this industry and provides the resources for it to keep going. However, it’s not particularly the easiest segment to keep audiences’ attention. They are there to see their favorite team win the game, after all. Sprinkling in some heart rate analytics data and high heart rate replays may help make these sections more engaging and additional visual information in the form of stylised heart rate widgets will encourage active viewing and keep all the eyes on screen.
It wouldn’t be much of a hustle either. Modern heart rate monitors come in various forms and are designed to be comfortable to wear even while doing various highly mobile activities. Some of the streamers who use heart rate monitors routinely on their streams even reported forgetting about wearing one at all and being surprised to discover they had it on the whole time. Pulsoid on the other hand provides a foolproof and fast way to handle the data from the monitors. Everything is handled on the web so there’s no need to install a lot of additional software. All you need is a phone app to get the monitors’ dataflow and a Pulsoid account.
More than that, esports is a great place for companies to advertise their products and many of them are eager for a chance to do so in a natural manner. There are a lot of opportunities for fitness brands to appeal to a new audience with the introduction of their heart rate monitors to the players’ equipment which means more resources to go towards production of the event.
Source: Polar.com
A huge part of the esports tournament is a conversation around it in any form. Heart rate data provides new grounds for it to flourish. No matter what we talk about: analysis from experts in between the rounds or twitter threads on who the most cold blooded player is, it all gives more incentives for new viewers to check out the tournament. The future where heart rate data is both a part of players’ training process and additional entertainment value is pretty feasible. In this day and age information is what keeps everything going so it’s always nice to have a bit more of it.
Why Pulsoid?
If everything said above made you wonder what the best way to add heart rate widgets and analytics to your broadcast is, we've got you covered. Pulsoid has long been the staple for content makers to add their heart rate to their streams and videos with a variety of widgets. For more than five years we’ve been expanding our service and making it more reliable and user friendly. We have a history of collaborations and integrations with other streaming related services and are looking forward to working in a new direction. Pulsoid is a platform that was designed to handle all things heart rate related with streaming and gaming in mind.
Pulsoid widget on a stream (streamer: Nmagnum78)
Pulsoid is easy and fast to set up. Just a couple of minutes will get you up and running. We are actively working on making interaction with our platform as frictionless as possible and automating every possible step. Considering how many things have to be set up simultaneously during the event and how important time management is, it is crucial for the set up process to be fast, easy and reliable.
Pulsoid widgets are designed to be flexible and easy to configure. More than that, we can easily add new custom widgets to specific accounts in a timely manner. With the most time spent on the design new widgets can be created and added to the account in less than a week or even 1-2 days. Some advanced mechanics may require a bit of additional development but with the scope of things already implemented this will rarely be needed and even then it is unlikely to be a lengthy process. It means that your broadcasts will feature widgets that fit your style, may feature branding and be customised for every event, team or even player. The power of branding is huge so why not have one more thing help you build it?
Our integrations with services like IFTTT allow you to create various scripted scenarios that play out according to changes in heart rate. Controlling smart lights, social media posts or ordering audience members a pizza every time a player's heart rate breaks a certain threshold. Your creativity is the only limitation. Make every event fun and unique with fresh interactions and the player's surroundings reacting directly to their heart rate.
Analytics is a major part of esport and Pulsoid has it covered with built in analytic tools and even the possibility to sync player’s heart rate to a Twitch VOD. This feature is always expanding its functionality so the list of possible use cases will only grow. Communication with esports organisations is what can fuel this development and let us tailor it to the needs of the industry.
The most important thing is that we are eager to collaborate. We are willing to walk an extra mile to adapt our service to the needs of esports but we need an opportunity to find out what else we can improve. There is no better way to do so than working with the tournament organisation directly. So if you want to showcase players’ heart rate with style and ease on your next event hit us up. You can write us a letter on support@pulsoid.net or contact us on Twitter. We can walk you through the process of setting everything up, provide a demo, discuss the possibilities of our API that lets third party developers utilise the information handled by our service and negotiate custom solutions that require additional development. Heart rate info is also saved as a csv file which allows for visualisations and excel spreadsheet magic. Graphics built on this data will be a great supporting content to show before the next event or post on Twitter after the fact. Let’s talk and find out how to make esports better together!
We always felt enthusiastic about the perspective of our product being used in professional gaming tournaments. Heart rate monitoring and professional sports go hand in hand. That's why we feel like esports and a service created with gaming in mind is a match made in heaven. As fans of esports ourselves who grew up watching CS, Dota 2 and League tournaments, as gamers who played these games themselves and created this service driven by our fascination with streaming and as developers who are passionate about their product we wholeheartedly believe in this future.
