[Kevin Sevcik]

Sheesh, I stop reading for a few weeks, and everything changes except the topics....
Ok, I'd like to clear up something.... It takes a LOT of money to simply produce a TV show, much less get it aired on TV. Don't you people realize this? I mean, I know FIRST has some big companies behind it, but that's a lot of money to ask for. And don't think that selling ad time will completely cover the cost of production and air time. Heck, if that worked, then corporations would start buying TV shows and air-time, then sell ad time and place some ads themselves and still make a tidy profit. Obviously, this isn't the case, so no matter what, it's going to cost FIRST money to make a show themselves. But that's beside the point. I've got another, much more important, much more controvesial point.

Even if FIRST makes a show, or if someone makes a show for FIRST, what are the odds that people will be interested? C'mon. Step out of your FIRST addicted minds and look at this objectively. Say we went back to a highly competitive format like '98. No teams at all. I still don't think there would be many people watching this. Sure there's competition, but we're still lacking what BattleBots, RobotWars, and Robotica have in spades. That would be a very easy to determine objective and scoring system.
Also, if FIRST competitions were made into a series, there either wouldn't be enough material, or there wouldn't be anything to hold each episode together and make people come back. If you show the seeding rounds, there would be too many teams for people to follow, and there wouldn't be a clear-cut winner at the end of every show. But if you stick to just elimination rounds, there just wouldn't be enough material for more than a couple of shows.
Basically, I think FIRST just will never be as TV friendly as other robot shows, and isn't very likely to get picked up by a network or anything.