FIRST "Final 4": Ready for live TV (non-NASA TV)?

[David Brinza]

The pinnacle event of the FIRST competition season was not televised because NASA TV switched to other scheduled programming at 6 pm EDT. I'm sure there were many viewers (including my wife) who were disappointed with the dropped coverage. Yes, there was a web-cast feed, but depending on the internet service, watching the matches can vary from acceptable to unbearable.

As an alternative, could the Einstein matches be televised live on a channel like Discovery (Science or Times)? The planning and timing would be critical to packaging this into a 90-minute or perhaps 2 hour segment. In between matches, speeches from Dean, Woodie, Dave Lavery, John Abele and special guests could be broadcast, but they will need to be short and "hard-hitting" on the purpose and value of FIRST. The top awards (including the engineering,website and animation awards) should be presented with images of the winning teams robot, etc. Choreographing all of this would be a BIG challenge and, hopefully, not impact the alliances during this most critical time.

In this thread, I'd hope to see discussion about the pluses and minuses of FIRST moving into "prime-time" and some suggestions for how this might work.