The opening weekends of League of Legends’ LTA North and LTA South Split 1 have shown opposite audience trends.
The LTA North has recorded fewer viewers than the 2024 LCS Spring Split, with the LTA South garnering slightly more peak viewers than its 2024 CBLOL Split 1 opening week.
The first days of Riot Games’ new cross-conference league peaked at 148,603 viewers in the Northern Conference and 254,464 for its Southern counterpart, according to esports data platform Esports Charts.
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The League of Legends Championship of the Americas (LTA) was announced last year as part of Riot’s restructuring of the competitive LoL ecosystem in the Americas. The new format is divided into two conferences, with the LTA North featuring some LCS teams and the LTA South representing the former CBLOL.
The ecosystem changes also saw a reduction in the number of teams competing as each conference offers seven slots with the addition of a guest slot. The two regions kicked off on January 25th and will continue until February 9th, with BO3 matches throughout the double-elimination brackets.
So far, only the Southern conference has been able to keep up with viewership trends compared to the beginning of the region’s League of Legends esports season last year.
LTA South’s week one peak viewership is even slightly above the 246,560 fans who tuned in to watch the initial matches of CBLOL Split 1 2024.
This is a good sign for the newly formed league, as last year’s Split 1 was the most-watched competition within the CBLOL.
In contrast, the LCS Spring 2024 exceeded LTA North’s audience by over 40,000 peak viewers, with 191,540 peak viewers during its opening week.
Both LTA conferences are operating on a double-elimination tournament bracket for Split 1, which is different from the LCS and CBLOL’s typical group stage format. As a result, as the stakes increase, more fans will likely tune in to the tournament’s later stages.
The top four teams of each region will advance to the LTA Cross-Conference, which offers qualification to the first international League of Legends event of the season.
The most popular matches of the past weekend were FlyQuest versus Shopify Rebellion (SR) in the LTA North and LOUD against paiN Gaming in the LTA South.
The latter two organisations dominantly led in terms of hours watched within the conference, with LOUD and paiN’s match generating 829,200 watch hours. However, this is not the case for FlyQuest and Shopify Rebellion.
With 202,400 watch hours, Cloud9 versus LYON lead the chart within the LTA North. FlyQuest and Shopfiy Rebellion generated 179,400 watch hours.
LTA North also saw interesting audience statistics regarding the most popular streaming platforms and broadcast languages.
Although Twitch (104,523 peak viewers) and English-language broadcasts (105,854) lead both categories, those tuning in on YouTube (43,323) and watching Portuguese-language broadcasts (41,044) accounted for a decent percentage of the audience.
In the LTA South, Portuguese-language broadcasts (241,678 peak viewers) attracted the vast majority of the region’s viewership. Meanwhile, YouTube (144,567) and Twitch (117,097) were equally popular.
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