TeamSpeak, which makes online communication services for competitive online gaming, has launched TeamSpeak Tournament Edition (TST), a customized version of TeamSpeak designed for online, local networks, and virtual gaming events.
Using a self-hosted option or TeamSpeak’s own TST Platform, the new version enables tournament events to pivot from live, in-person competitions to be all virtual. TeamSpeak has been downloaded more than 135 million times in the past year.
Built using the company’s secure voice technology, TeamSpeak Tournament Edition and the TST Platform are already being used by the Overwatch League, which selected TeamSpeak as its official voice supplier for the 2020 to 2023 seasons.
“It’s a pretty significant upgrade to the existing client-server products that are used by millions of people,” said Michael Howse, an adviser to TeamSpeak, in an interview. “This is specific to the league use case. We built a super lightweight client that has about a 10-megabyte footprint. It is very small, very light, and super low-latency. This improves performance for high-performance teams.”
Pete Emminger, vice president of global broadcast at Blizzard Entertainment, in a statement that Blizzard chose TeamSpeak for its superior performance and mission critical in-game communications. Now that the Overwatch League has gone entirely online, and Blizzard uses TeamSpeak not only for the team competitive environment, but also as a production communications system that all of our crew and talent uses to produce the broadcast from dozens of locations around the globe simultaneously.
The new version represents a change in the business model for TeamSpeak.
“Blizzard was the first project we put together where we can do some custom implementation of TeamSpeak as a service,” Howse said.
Meanwhile, iRacing, the official racing simulation portal, is also using TeamSpeak Tournament Edition and the TST Platform. Also reacting to the coronavirus, iRacing is bringing the world’s top motorsports teams and brands online in virtual car racing competitions. Partnering with the industry’s recognized names like eNASCAR, eIndyCar, and others, iRacing is leveraging TeamSpeak’s voice technology and services, beginning with the 2020 season.
The plan at iRacing is to reach more than two million virtual spectators per race in livestreams, and millions more via live TV broadcasts on Fox Sports and NBC Sports.
New advisers
Above: Greg Ballard and Michael Howse of Eleven VC
Image Credit: SRK Headshot Day
As part of this launch, the company also announced the appointment of three game industry veterans and serial entrepreneurs to its board of advisors.
They include Howse, general partner of Eleven Ventures, former CEO of Bigfoot Networks and executive board member of UCLA Ventures; Kent Wakeford, co-founder and vice chairman of Gen.G Esports and former COO of Kabam; as well as Greg Ballard, also a general partner at Eleven Ventures, board member of Turtle Beach, and former executive at Warner Interactive, and former CEO of Glu Mobile.
Together these experienced advisors will provide their insights and guidance as TeamSpeak continues to scale.
“We came together to help the company to really modernize its vision and its business model,” Howse said.
TeamSpeak Tournament Edition provides the fastest, lowest latency and most efficient system resource voice technology, Howse said.
Ian Bamford, CEO of San Diego, California-based TeamSpeak, said in a statement that the TST platform is now available to events, leagues, and broadcasters as either a self-hosted option or hosted through TeamSpeak. He said that seamless in-game communications are critical on every level, and he is happy that the technology is being used by some of the largest and most successful teams and leagues.
Using almost no system resources, the lightweight client is fast to ensure it won’t interrupt game performance. It ensures under 20 milliseconds of latency, advanced voice detection, and it provides artificial intelligence background noise reduction.
It works with LAN or via TeamSpeak’s new online service. And it is customizable to meet esports workflow and team management requirements. It works with existing tournament workflow, and it has customizable modules like multi-track recording, external control integration, hotkey customization
game engine integration, and broadcast system integration.
TeamSpeak provides secure online and off-line environments for voice communications that can be recorded, distributed, transported and managed by one central admin while maintaining the lowest levels of latency and resource usage.
TST helps the teams communicate with each other and to talk with managers. Production personnel and commentators can also use the tool. Up to 200 people can use it. Doing this work helped deepen the relationship with Blizzard, which was hobbled by the coronavirus.
“Most of those people are working from home now, so they’re all working from home all using Teamspeak globally to play their games and also to manage the production itself,” Howse said. “We ware in a stay-at-home world now. We had to modify the product into a service That allowed the league to continue to do business and to attract the large audiences.”
iRacing draws big online crowds
Above: Jimmy Johnson in an iRacing simulator.
Image Credit: iRacing/TeamSpeak
TeamSpeak also had a relationship with iRacing, where racer Jimmy Johnson participated in a virtual racing competition using a racing simulator.
“This past weekend, the results they had were extraordinarily impressive,” Howse said. “They streamed to millions of users on Fox Sports and NBC Sports, with the traditional NASCAR commentators in Teamspeak.”
The broadcast helped show that traditional racing show TV audiences will watch an esports event, Howse said. He noted that Johnson had 38,000 followers watching him inside the racing simulator and he was communicating with broadcasters and his team at the same time. TeamSpeak has 45 employees, and it has been self-financed to date.
While other services have had a lot of outages related to the surge in internet usage, TeamSpeak hasn’t had those problems, partly because of its lightweight architecture, Howse said.
“Because of the way the product is architected, it has this kind of instant failover capability,” he said. “There’s a big advantage that we have in scalability, with this novel client-server architecture. That is really working for us extremely well right now. And I think people really feel the difference because you can deploy it locally and you can deploy TeamSpeak server in your house. The technology does exactly what it’s supposed to do in this coronavirus crisis, and it’s been never been more popular.”
