Image: Electronic Arts
Here's even more evidence that eSports are capturing mainstream attention.The NFL has announced a partnership with Electronic Arts to produce a weekly digital show, airing live on Twitch.tv, about Madden NFL. Episodes, which will also be made available on nfl.com and on the league's mobile apps, are centered around "tips and tricks for how to up your game." Fun!Beyond merely being yet another example of the NFL aggressively courting online fans—the league also has deals in place with Twitter and Verizon for video highlights (and full live games in Verizon's case)—the Twitch deal caps a week in which another mainstream outlet, Turner Broadcasting, said it would air a Counter-Strike eSports league on its TBS cable network. Activision also said this week that it would put up $3 million for an eSports tournament for its still-popular Call of Duty series.The news of the live Madden digital show was announced in conjunction with TwitchCon, a weekend-long convention in San Francisco hosted by the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform. Twitch also announced at the convention that users will be able to upload video to the platform beginning in 2016. (Previously, users could only livestream footage of themselves but could not upload pre-recorded footage.) YouTube Gaming, which is Twitch's largest competitor, has had this feature since it launched in August.