Half-Life TV

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Half-Life TV, more commonly known as HLTV, was created by Valve Software in 2001 and allows for the broadcasting of matches on the Half-Life engine. Games supported include Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, and Day of Defeat. Valve has since expanded this technology to games based on the Source engine (SourceTV). This technology allows spectators to see a "bird's eye view" of the playing field (or map) and to watch the competition develop. Spectators are often interested in world championship events; this HLTV technology allows them to spectate the game as if they were playing inside it. The current world record stands at around 39,500 simultaneous spectators for the Cyberathlete Professional League finals in 2004. HLTV is able to provide support for many thousands of users through a hierarchical chaining system where 1 master HLTV supports several sub-masters, and those sub-masters support their own sub-sub-masters, etc, until the nodes at the bottom of this tree support the spectators directly. Several hundreds of HLTV proxies supported the viewing of the 2004 finals match mentioned above.

HLTV is commonly used in almost all Counter-Strike leagues and events. The technology is freely available to the public, but often gamers will purchase an HLTV server for their team from a game server company to provide the bandwidth to support tens or hundreds of spectators. (Free booking of HLTV servers, although rarely available in the U.S. except for professional teams, is more common in Europe.) The goal is to acquire a fan base of support for a team by allowing spectators to watch matches and to critique the strategies they employ on different maps.

HLTV also has the ability to record (or more appropriately, create demos or replays of) matches in online amateur leagues and of scrimmages between competing teams. Team members or other people with an interest can then replay the demo to evaluate the effectiveness of various strategies and to improve their teamwork.