They are not athletes of any sort. Are they the best at what they do? Hell yea. Its like calling the best checkers player an athlete. The vids of the competitions are pretty neat to watch though, its definately very intense and competitive.

Stream subscriptions. Now, it is entirely possible to watch the stream for free; I pay for the convenience of being able to see the video later, in HD, and without adverts. And even then most of that is for the Korean broadcast, you can watch most EU and US tournaments in HD for free.

Here's what I paid:

Korean GSL/GSL Team League: ~1000 (!) hours of commentated matches a year HD no-ad video access for $120
MLG: Four weekends of HD no-ad stream (videos posted for free 1 week later) for $30
Several special one-off events for $5 and $10 each

Free tournaments:

IPL team league (most nights, free)
NASL league and team league (most nights, free)
Dreamhack (five weekends/year, free HD and videos)
IPL (three weekends/year, free videos)
IEM (six weekends/year, free HD and videos)
Homestory Cup
Iron Squid (two weekends/year)
Korean OSL (didn't pay so only free stream, 100 hours of matches/year)
Battle.net World Championship ($250,000) (free in HD no ads)

Oh and I watched the Dota 2 invitational ($2,000,000 free in HD no-ads)

And that's only the top-tier tournaments. There's lots of smaller events which are all free ad-supported, and then at any time usually 10-20 pro players are streaming their practice on twitch.tv.

I never would have thought they actually charged internet viewers.

But I guess it's kinda cool. To pay to get rid of the ads makes sense. I can't stand ads.

I've watched some old matches of Age of Empires II and it's often very exciting. And I'm not into Starcraft 2 at all but still I've enjoyed watching some matches on YouTube.

I definitely miss the golden age when SC was not the only viable RTS. No company is prepared to invest in the genre any more and give it the multi-year balance patches and support needed to foster competitive play. All recent attempts have been F2P or MMO or other trendy stuff that doesn't work for 1v1 RTS.

The future of SC2 is that they have to become more like UFC with regular PPV events and storylines. Otherwise once the more casual players leave SC2 due to lack of novelty the scene will just die, because ads alone can't sustain flying all these players around the world.

When I'm able to play Dota2 at home I'll start watching that more, because I enjoyed The Invitational without knowing what was going on.

Oh yeah, do you play any of those? Like Starcraft 2 or LOL for example?

What's your time split between watching and playing yourself?

Any other games you play heavily? I seldom see you discuss single players games anymore.

I spend maybe 3 hours playing and 6 hours watching SC2 in a week. The playing is useful to keep up with the latest strategies.

I did play LoL a little but I realised that I needed to put money in to stay as one champion but then they could take my account off me for leaving games. I'm waiting to be able to play Dota2 and see how that goes. 

I liked Minecraft in small amounts.

I'm pretty much done with console gaming because of how Nintendo's been acting this gen. The last game I was excited for (Paper Mario) turned out to be nothing like the N64 version and it's the latest in a long string of disappointments from Prime 3, Other M, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword, 3D Land, NSMB 2 (not Wii), and Galaxy 2 (not Galaxy 1). I see games getting more linear and more story-heavy over time. And finally a lot of why I play games is soundtrack, and the last game soundtrack I liked was Xenoblade.

So the only game I plan to purchase in the next year is the SC2 expansion. All in all I've replaced videogames with ponies.

If my brother will let me I plan to sell my 3DS and not buy a Wii U.

Not money spending wise you haven't though? Time spent on watching the series, yes, but you don't buy the merchandise attached to the show I hope?

I might move away a little from games myself. I'm planning to heavily get into aquaristics for example.