Ready For TV Yet?

[Marc P.]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

Most of the TV announcers describe Texax Hold'em as hours of boredom with a few minutes of terror thrown in. No one is going to watch the hours of boredom just for the minutes of terror - therefore they tape and edit.

I'm not saying that FIRST contains consecutive hours of boredom, but out of a typical 8 hour day full of matches, 5-6 hours of it is down time. In addition, some of the matches just aren't that interesting. Besides that, I don't think that there's anything in the world that is interesting enough for people to sit and watch for 8 hours in one block - people have things to do.

I bet that you can take an entire regional and edit it into about 1 - 1.5 hours of exciting television. If FIRST becomes popular enough, the show could air on Sunday - the day after the event. I don't ever see FIRST going live for an entire event - MAYBE the final 4 at the Championship, but that's it.

This was exactly my thought when combining FIRST with TV. To the competitors, it's exciting to watch your team's hard work come to fruitation by fielding a robot and having it compete. To the average person who has no idea what goes into building a robot, or what the spirit of FIRST is, the competition looks like 8 hours of repetitive motion. It's not even so much that the matches are boring to watch, but more that people watching the same type of game over and over and over again tend to become disinterested after a period of time. Robots come on the field, move around, shoot some balls, move off the field, rinse, repeat. It's interesting for the first few matches while the concept of the game sinks in, but after watching 20 or so matches in a row, it does get repetitive. This is especially true if an outsider doesn't have a team to relate to. Take a sport like baseball for example- most people interested in baseball have a favorite team, like the Red Sox, or Yankees, and have favorite players on each team, like Manny Ramirez, or Derek Jeter. People can watch a full 9 innings of baseball because they have a team to root for, and their team/players are out there for all 9 innings. In a FIRST competition, even if a spectator has a favorite team, that team will only be competing in 8 or 9 out of around 100ish matches. The rest of the 90ish matches won't hold as much meaning or interest, and combined with the repetition of the game, can easily become boring to the average TV watching person.

I think the solution is like many have already posted in this thread- put together an edited show documenting the trials of one or a few individual teams throughout the build season (Discovery Channel did this for some teams in the 2004 season, details in this thread ), and finish it up with highlights from the team's performance at the competitions. This will generate interest in how the robots come to be, give the spectators some attachment to the featured team, and as a result give the viewers someone to root for when watching video of the competition itself. All the while, it may encourage people who otherwise wouldn't have known about FIRST to seek out teams in their area and offer whatever assistance they can. Accomplish that, and it may help make Dean's dream of a FIRST team in every high school a reality, once enough people see what's involved in working with a team and realize they can easily become a part of it.