Earlier this evening an announcement was made on the EPS Nordic page that Blank-TV would be the official broadcasting partner for their league.

This meant that the organisation would have exclusive rights to broadcast the HLTV and SourceTV for all ESL Pro Series Nordic matches that won't be on ESL TV. Not really big news you may think, but it doesn't seem to have gone down very well with the 1.6 community who are, to put it lightly, slightly peeved that it will no longer be HLTV.org who have those rights.

Shortly after the announcement was made on the ESL site, HLTV.org made the following news post:

In a move that came as a total surprise and shock to us today, ESL have decided to ban HLTV.org from showing any matches from EPS Nordic III.

For the past two seasons, and for all other ESL events HLTV.org has been doing our complete coverage, we pioneered our Dreamteam game on EPS Nordic season 2, developing it in a rapid pace to get it ready for the league start, we do weekly stats breakdowns and complete coverage of EPS Germany, and cover all other Pro Series leagues ESL provides. Therefore it was of course a big shock to us as we were informed via the ESL page today that we would not be allowed to show EPS Nordic at all.

The move come without any contact to HLTV.org what so ever offering us to compete with Blank-TV on terms or quality, it was simply made behind our back. In this, for us, very weird move all HLTV rights go to Blank-TV, a German HLTV broadcaster that does not even feature an English site, nor any kind of coverage that can match up against our complete package.

ESL puts emphasis on that this deal will ensure them a dependable partner, we can only speculate how more dependable than showing all matches, running all stats, instantly uploading all demos with stats highlights, and even covering the lan finals of ESL Nordic season 1 on-site.

In short however this will not affect you guys at all, what ever motives ESL might have should not hurt our users, so we will keep doing our match pages, keep doing stats, Dreamteam and so forth, but we can sadly not do anything if the HLTV crashes, gets overloaded, and if demos are lost so could vital stats for the stats section and Dreamteam, but this is the position ESL is forcing us into. Livescore will also not be possible as we will not be receiving server information.

We can only ask that you guys, and the teams, let ESL know what you think of this deal, HLTV.org could throw our weight behind a total boycott of the league and their operations, but we honestly do not think that is fair for the thousands of fans out there who wish not to be part of ESLs plan to keep high quality matches away from the public.

The ESL then fought back with a statement of their own, stating that they have not dropped HLTV.org or gone behind their back to seek a new deal, they have simply offered rights - which are theirs to offer - to Blank-TV. They also stated that the reasoning behind the move was HLTV's failure to backlink from their HLTV to the ESL match pages, something Blank-TV are willing to do.

The head of ESL Nordic Gustav Marius 'flabbert' Karto said the following on HLTV.org:

I contacted Nix from HLTV.org in early/mid may about the issues that they did not in any way backlink from their HLTV to our matches, and we in ESL Nordic asked kindly whether they would be able to do so. We got declined quite harshly, then in early/mid june I approached Nomad/Nix again with an offer of them becoming exclusive HLTV provider for nordic if they gave us some simple backlinks in return, and linked to our matches. Once again the rebuttal was direct, and I gathered that HLTV.org were simply not interested in such a deal, and went to another provider, which in this case was Blank-TV, Blank-TV were happy to accomodate our request to become the exclusive HLTV partner and we agreed on terms that both parties could live with swiftly, which led to us agreeing terms, and setting up the deal.

We did not ban HLTV.org from anything we simply gave the rights which are ours to give, to someone else. This newspost, and the conversations I had with some HLTV.org staff proves that it was the correct move to do so.

Things have begun heating up already and with the CS 1.6 community currently at loggerheads with the EPS Nordic it's a topic of debate that's likely to run for a while yet.