I know in the past, when Championships were at EPCOT, ESPN showed it on national television. Since then, I don't believe it's been shown. I know in the past others were talking about this on here and wondering why it isn't there anymore, other than the fact that we left Disney World (since Disney owns 80% of ESPN, they can tell them what to do). There isn't anything else big going on at the end of April in the sports world, as far as I remember. In fact, ESPN doesn't have anything for most March or April, since CBS owns the rights to the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.
Since the last time we were on ESPN, they have added a new channel, ESPNU (which will show high school sports too), and the online streaming option of ESPN3 or WatchESPN (which ever they are calling it this week). There are so many options, I think they could easily show robotics.
Here is my idea of how it goes down. Each field of championship is on a different stream, through ESPN3. One of the actual channels (ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNews, ESPNU, etc.) switches around with the feed of each one, sort of like the ESPN Goal Line programming, depending on the excitement of each field's matches. There would be a College GameDay like program at the beginning of each day.
We have a big group of people that would watch this. You would probably get a lot of teams not at championships watching, plus the schools of the teams that are at championships watching this. I feel like the numbers would make it make sense.
I've been thinking of emailing the Vice President of Content Program & Integration, Carol Stiff, for a little while now about this idea. Her email, I believe, is
carol.stiff@espn.com. What does the FIRST community think of this idea? Anyone else want to join me and try to email her?