Final Championship match on national TV?

[David Brinza]

The final Aim High match has to rank one of the best ever FIRST matches (I know that there's a thread on this very subject). If the raw video from the multiple cameras covering Einstein is still available on recordings, a qualified editor/director should be able to put together a really slick video from this match for airing on national TV. The high scoring match (98-94) is typical of professional basketball game, but compressed in time by a factor of twenty.

I could imagine a 10 - 15 minute segment that describes FIRST, shows Dave Lavery's animation to explain the game, the final match of the championship with selected replays, crowd shots, drive team reactions, etc. Given the NBA playoffs are in full swing, this could attract a wide audience (robotic "basketball" championship). This could be a really good promotion for FIRST. Also, it would allow the FIRST community to see the final match on TV rather than web-cast - presumably with better video and sound quality...

[Heretic121]

to add to this ESPN for the first time since 2001 i want to say showed clips of FIRST and the championships saturday night on ESPN... when and what they showed i dont know i only heard it from my little brother *12* who was watching it... so this could be a big turn around for FIRST since ESPN used to cover the whole championships back in the 96-2000 days...

[spears312]

Putting FIRST on national in any sort of game context is probably a difficult sell. For the common person, watching a bunch of machines run around a field shooting balls and doing minimal damage to each other doesn’t exactly sound exciting. Battlebots wouldn't have even aired (before suffering from bad ratings) if it hadn’t had the sort of destruction and carnage that it did. Additionally the fact that there are so many teams is a detractor because an uninformed audience both has a difficult time picking a favorite as well as having a difficult time distinguishing one bot from the next. I can honestly say I have gone back and viewed footage from this year and sometimes loose track of our team’s robot when there is a lot of traffic. Combine this with the vast number of short matches, it becomes even more difficult to enjoy.

While eliminations are a slightly different story, it can still be difficult to fully relate to the competition over the short span of time that the finals cover. As for the production aspect, NASA does do a very good job as is, but (this varies from year to year) with so much action on the field in so many different locations, the viewer is likely to only get a narrow picture and miss crucial plays.

As far as ESPN's previous coverage, it was probably due to FIRST's previous relations with Disney, which owns ESPN, so it was probably in their best interest to advertise that this sort of competition was happening at the Walt Disney World Resort.

I personally have never seen a televised game on NASA, but I have watched various web casts and I believe that what we have right now is truly outstanding coverage. I wouldn’t have it any other way, and although it doesn’t have the public notoriety as national TV, it seems to have worked just as well because the growth of FIRST has continued to go through the roof post ESPN.


(Sorry if this was a little long winded, but I just had AP English Lit exams today and I’m stuck on over explaining things)