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.

[Greg Perkins]

If championship started being nationally televised, heck I'd need to go get that 50" plasma I've been drooling over! I've said that for years, they need to make FIRST telecasted on discover or TLC or Spike!. It'll never happen, but hey, a man can dream cant he?

[Rohith Surampudi]

even better than discovery, lets take over abc...we could take Dean's "super bowl of smarts" to the max, 50" widescreen tv's, huge partys... sooo awesome

[David Brinza]

HDTV, stereo sound, all that cool stuff is a plus.
What about commercials, and "going on cue" as minus??

[Rohith Surampudi]

ooo can we charge lke a million dollars for 30 seconds too, and use the money to build a brand new venue just for nats

[Nawaid Ladak]

It would be nice to have it on ABC, and i don't think it would be too hard, knowing that ESPN used to do FIRST, but why not do all the feilds, for example Galelao on NASA TV, Discovrey Times Having Curie, ESPN/ESPN2 Having Anaylasis, VEX, and FLL Discovrey having Archiemedes, Science having Curie, and TLC having Newton, with Einstine being broadcasted later in the night. ie: Prime Time 8PM to 10PM, start the playoffs with 12 allinces at like 3, with awards and all that nice stuff. maybe on ESPN News having a little FIRST bar on their ticker, saying which high schools advance to Einstine,

And for hevens sake, you will need a smaller onscreen Scorebord, consider the Monday Night Football Scoreboard or something nice like that.

various other stations can broadcast regionals and playoffs, ie: SpikeTV gets Midwest Regional Discovrey gets GTR, and NASA gets well.... NASA/VCU

something nice like that

just my $0.02

[David Brinza]

With multiple cameras covering the matches selected by directors familiar with the game (knowing what action on the field is important to the outcome) and the possibility of instant replays after the matches, the viewers will get a really good understanding of how the match was played. Add wireless mini-cameras on the robots (not counted against robot weight) and the coverage could be really spectacular.
Of course, the latter suggestion adds some complication to the robot design, a bit more complicated than the standard flag holder rule...

[Tristan Lall]

Let's be realistic about the nature of television. The broadcasters exist to profit from commercials—with the exception of public stations like NASA TV, or a PBS affiliate. For that sort of a business model to work, they need to be sure that any program will appeal to a sufficiently large audience, and that they can sell advertising targeted to that audience. Lacking either, they won't show a full-length broadcast of the game.

FIRST's current strength, when it comes to public exposure, involves the entire process—in other words, it's better-suited to a documentary approach. If the documentaries are good enough, it may come to pass that more and more people are willing to look beyond that, to the game itself—but here, one of FIRST's strengths becomes a weakness. We like the fact that the game is new every year—but to the layman, this means that the common ground is limited from season to season. When that happens, more time needs to be devoted to exposition, rather than gameplay—in essence, it needs to revert to the documentary format (after a fashion, at least) to explain what's going on.

Part of the problem likely has to do with the general lack of technological familiarity among the general public. It's easy for something that draws upon base instincts to become popular (e.g. Survivor); but what about something that is in large part not result-oriented, and instead process-oriented, and is furthermore dependent on the sort of technical skills that are not particularly widespread among the general populace? On American Chopper, or things of that nature, the projects themselves are secondary to the petty bickering and ineptitude of the cast—and let's face it, if it consisted of 70%* engineering and design, would it be so popular?

We all know that the general public wouldn't care what Sergey Brin wanted to say, and wouldn't know who Dean Kamen is. That added wrinkle makes for an interesting problem. If the stated objective is culture change, and these speeches are the instruments by which the process begins, how could we justify the obvious concession to television—putting the commercials in between matches, and ignoring the slow-paced oratory?

Basically, FIRST isn't ready for (profitable) prime time. It's not that it wouldn't be beneficial, it's just that the format is not very compatible, and the presentation isn't conducive to the generation of profit. Actually, one might say that prime time isn't ready for FIRST, but that's indicative of our perspective and priorities, which aren't by any means shared with the public. Maybe it's for the same reason that Battlebots, Robot Wars, and all other shows of that nature are broadcast only after heavy editing. The public wouldn't have a clue what was going on, if it weren't for the expository segments before and after each match. These segments are only possible because they can be filmed at different times, and prepared in advance of the broadcast date. I could see a FIRST show as being workable, but for a live broadcast to function well, there's much work to be done.

*This number doesn't imply anything about FIRST. I just needed to lie with statistics.

[Donut]

Without commercials, FIRST will never get aired on anything other than NASA TV, or another non-profit station. End of story.

If they were willing to allow commercials, it has a much better chance of being broadcast, and if FIRST let them broadcast it for free, it would sell even better (since TV stations have to pay for many of their shows and programs, a free event that could potentially draw a good number of viewers would be appealing). Realistically, FIRST would be better suited to start by being broadcast during a "slow" time for TV viewing (afternoon on Saturday or Sunday would be good, these are generally the times where alot of stations broadcast movies that have been out for 20 years or arts and crafts shows).

The biggest thing is that it would be difficult to get anything other than the playoffs aired on national TV (whether or not these playoffs were just Einstein or included divisional playoffs is questionable). FIRST is not about spreading fame for "winning" teams, but due to time and trying to keep anyone other than FIRST families intersted, it would be impractical to air many of the qualifying matches. Let's face it; the average American will not want to watch 6 semi-decent robots attempt to score about 30-40 points in a match, no matter how touching the story of making that robot and getting to the competition may be.

I think their's a chance FIRST could get the Championship on national TV (ABC seems easier than the others), but it would require some major sacrafices of the whole competition, and would take a number of years before FIRST would even have a shot at a "prime-time" slot.

[dpraedan]

Originally Posted by rvssnake

even better than discovery, lets take over abc...we could take Dean's "super bowl of smarts" to the max, 50" widescreen tv's, huge partys... sooo awesome

I'll be honest, myself and some other kids from 190 set up the Boston webcast on my tv and watched that for a while. Plus, my parents set up the Orlando and Galileo webcasts on our 140" projector screen while I was at them. It was certainly a blast for everyone. Beats any other sport any day.

[John Gutmann]

Originally Posted by rvssnake

even better than discovery, lets take over abc...we could take Dean's "super bowl of smarts" to the max, 50" widescreen tv's, huge partys... sooo awesome

...or you could go there with your team?

...just a thought...

[themagic8ball]

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...8&page=3&pp=15

We already have a thread on this ^. I don't know if a mod wants to combine them.

Anyway, I disagree that FIRST isn't ready for the prime time. Think about it, FIRST has a LOT of sponsors, I'm sure they wouldn't mind fronting a little bit more cash for a 30 second TV spot on ABC. And there is a large audience... its all the families and teams that weren't able to make it to Atlanta, which does make up a decent amount of people. I think the major issue to get the General Public to watch is to have commercials for the event about a week or 2 before it happens so people know its going to happen.

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by 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.

Maybe if the Einstein Finals could be kept to their scheduled time, the entire event could be shown.

The "Heidi Bowl" fiasco got so many complaints that now network tv delays later programs to finish up games. They don't like it, but they do it for the fans. FIRST doesn't have enough general-population fans to get that kind of leverage, whether it's network tv, widely available cable, or niche cable channels. So FIRST has to get themselves back on schedule. (And then maybe, just maybe, the food at the party might be somewhere near warm ... )

[Donut]

Originally Posted by sparksandtabs

...or you could go there with your team?

...just a thought...

Some of us are lucky enough to be able to attend our own regional event.

FIRST is just going to have to estimate its timing better or shift the time they air from. Obviously they can't know the exact time the competition will take, but I think they could at least get within 1 hour of the correct time.

My vote still goes for taping the thing and editing it to make it fit in a time slot big TV channels will accept. Once we prove that works we can start dreaming about live national coverage of the Championships.

[hoorayforpink]

i agree with mr donut, to get an audience FIRST needs to make a video of ther best matches get that on tv and go from there. seems like the most likely thing to happen if FIRST were to try to get on tv