Before the first Overwatch Contenders Season Zero streamed match of the day got underway the desk treated us to some new information regarding the next season.

Overwatch Contenders Season 1 will commence in the week starting Monday August 14th, which follows the conclusion of the Overwatch World Cup's Burbank Group Stage event. The six week regular season should be wrapped up by Sunday 24th September, after which there will be offline finals sometime in October with $100,000 prize pools for each region.

Fans around the world rejoiced at the news that all matches will be streamed live during Season 1. A bit of mental arithmetic will tell us that an eight team round robin would have 28 fixtures, 56 if you factor in the EU and NA regions. That would be 9.333 (repeating of course) matches a week. However, if you were split the eight teams into two groups it would produce 24 fixtures per region, 48 combined. That would be a nice round 8 matches per week. Call me Sherlock. Excuse the ramblings of this beautiful mind, but whatever way you cut it there will be a lot more Overwatch esports action on your screens in the coming months. We can likely expect the frequency of broadcasts to surpass even that of the Carbon Series.

Tagging in after the initial announcement, MonteCristo added a little context to the bullet points, painting a bigger picture of what Contenders means for the players, "...really all of this we have to consider as auditions for the Overwatch League. There's a lot of money on the line, but with the franchising coming in for the first season of the Overwatch League it's about showing your stuff now, proving that you are capable of playing at that top level, and attracting the contracts and the money from the professional teams."

Gilfrost concluded the segment, "Yeah because of course we've been watching these teams and how these teams can play together, but even more than that, about being a contender as a team, it's very much about being an individual contender for a lot of these players". A timely reminder that many of these teams may no longer be with us by the time the Overwatch League kicks off.