With the Evolution Championship Series 2011 done and dusted, some figures have now been released that show just how popular the annual fighting game tournament is. The official website of the event recently announced that the Evo World Finals this year had more than 2 million unique viewers tuning in on the live stream, which was hosted on Ustream.tv.
International pro-level 2D fighting + live stream = megaton views. Audiences consumed over 1.9 million hours of video content, both during the event and during the "after hours" showcase. The average time a viewer tuned in was 55 minutes. The live stream was done by the collaborative efforts of fighting game sites iPlayWinner, Team Sp00ky, Offcast, and FinestKO. The live stream was also viewable from within PlayStation Home.
The event itself was held at the Rio Hotel, Las Vegas. The winner of the Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition Grand Finals was Keita "Fuudo" Ai, who used Fei Long. The winner of the Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Grand Finals was Jay "BOX Viscant" Snyder, who used a team consisting of Wesker, Haggar, and Phoenix. In addition, gamers got to see a variety of panels, ranging from Namco Bandai to an interview of Daigo Umehara conducted by Seth Killian.
Check out GameSpot's article on all of the coverage related to Evo 2011.