Lost to the Blogger hiccup were some of the comments to the Burning Question below. A couple of which were very interesting because they appeared to be predicated on information similar to the drips and drabs passed along to me.
What we know--the NPPL, less than a week away from the event, has made no formal announcement about any sort of webcast. One commenter claimed there would be a webcast. Another claimed that the numbers from the HB broadcast weren't sufficient to entice ESPN3 to pay for future broadcasts out of their pockets. Which is an interesting way of framing a response. It implies ESPN3 made a decision not to move forward. It also (kinda) implies the HB viewer numbers didn't reach their targets. It also avoids being an outright falsehood--at least given what I think I know--which suggests to me the commenter knew what he was talking about.
Here's where it gets tricky. This story is a big deal for competitive paintball and could have greater implications for the league as well--but at the same time the league wants to keep what it considers its business private until it has something to promote in a press release. Yet here we are less than a week away from the Chicago event and there has been no news about anything. Given that the NPPL and its member teams, along with numerous other paintball websites, made a very public and concerted push to get the paintball community to sigh up and watch the HB live broadcast on ESPN3 it seems to me they owe that same community some sort of response as to what happened. Or that some of you people (yes, you) would show some interest and start demanding some answers.
I am not--at this time--gonna tell you what I've been told about all this because I don't have permission to use the info for a VFTD post or postings. (If I get it, I will.) But here are a couple of questions worth asking, and re-asking. If there is a Chicago webcast will it be affiliated with any outside of paintball broadcaster or media company? If not, does that mean the latest attempt to gain the interest of a company like ESPN--not to say ESPN itself--has failed? Is there any truth to the rumors the viewer numbers exceeded the target numbers?
Friday, May 13, 2011
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5 comments:
I was lucky enough to be on the HB ESPN3 webcast crew, and I can say definitively, without worry about any contradiction from the higher ups at the NPPL, that I don't know a single thing about this.
Thank you for reading.
Thanks for clarifying, Don.
so Don, when are you running for political office??
At one point Empire said on there twitter that there would be a webcast. I tried looking for it but it looks like they deleted it :/
If the target was 100,000 viewers, then the HB webcast did not even come close to meeting the target.
Here's a question: Was doing the HB webcast worse for paintball than doing no webcast at all?
Without the HB webcast, ESPN didn't know if we could make their numbers or not. Now that they did the webcast, they are absolutely sure that we can't make the numbers.
That might be OK if it was a wholehearted effort, but there was barely a couple weeks of promotion of the webcast, and that was all done to the tournament audience. Even if you put together all the email lists of all people who play tournament paintball, plus toss in all the regular PbN users and paintball news website viewers, you'd probably need one out of every 2 of them to tune into the webcast to hit 100,000 viewers.
There was no promotion in stores. No promotion in product packaging. No promotion on Facebook (as in ads). A half-assed effort is worse for us than no effort. Why didn't NPPL work on webcasting Vegas and do it right?
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