What's the fascination with making PB TV/spectator friendly?

[Just Curious]

Jesus Richard!!

Is there no end to your 'Bum-Licking'??
Wearing a 'Nexus' Jersey and blowing sunshine up Robbos posterior is not gonna get you a place on his Team!

 

[Robbo]

Originally posted by duffistuta

No I don't.


I would contest, oh yes you do

How many people in your sample of rec-ballers who have seen tournament videos and gone 'Wow'? 30? 50? 100?' It's still tiny.

I tell you this much, and I will use an average response that I have seen when we train, these numbers are not definitve but approximations but its the 'order of magnitude' that is important here.
Most of time I have seen these instances occurr there are generally between 20 to 30 people who stop to watch as they walk past or are bought out by the site marshalls because the rentals expressed an interest to come watch.
The young male demographic is almost entirely represented on these occasions, in other words, all the guys who turn up to play rental take a time out and come watch and they tend to walk away only when the site judges call them away.
This alone tells me the game itself is intirnsically attractive to those people.
On top of that response, we also get the 'questions'.
They wanna know the lot, how we play, where we play, about the markers and so on and so on.

I have taken all my mountain biking mates to play Paintball on three seperate occassions, some of them have played/watched tournaments that I got them into, I have forced them to watch DVDs...how many were interested and took it any further?

Once again an inappropriate sample being used as an indicator and I will suggest the examples I use are much more credible and therefore a better representation of the nation’s potential to take up paintball.
Your pals are already into a sport, their leanings are already represented in the mountain bike demographic, I think Joe Bloggs who goes out on a paintball weekend with his mates from work is a better representative of the nation’s average young male.


Now given that these were all young, affluent, sporty guys who experienced tournament ball either first hand or on DVD after having played as punters, why should we not use that as our test group?


because of above

I think the evidence overall weighs more heavily in my favour than yours. Maybe the ESPN footage next year will shift it in your favour, but the NXL one sure didn't.

Evidence ???
You honestly think a few of your biking friend's reactions is more credible than the hundreds of rentals I have seen over the past 3 years whilst training at Nottingham and Leicester??

I ain't having that for one single second, no way !

 

[duffistuta]

How many come back? How many take it further? How many actually 'do' anything now they have been exposed? As I said before, I do not doubt the passing interest from a group of people already playing, but I think that's all it is.

My mates play many sports and are constantly taking new ones up -one has just got into kite surfing, one windsurfing, one martial arts. They are not static, they are constantly taking up new things. Paintball grabbed none of them.

I am saying that they are one and the same thing, your rentals and my mates, cos they have all been in that exact position before.

 

[Baca Loco]

With all this back and forth nobody is addressing the idea of what is "success" in a TV sense or of pball on TV. If success is being as big as baseball or football, forget it. Won't happen. If success is attracting sufficient interest and viewership in a very diverse sports marketplace to stay on TV and become a recognized part of the sports world then I think that's possible, in fact, over here, even likely. (It will be interesting to see what sort of numbers will make WGN happy with the WPL/UAPL experiment.)
And since y'all are talking converting non-players into players the only way TV comes into that equation is by exposing the unexposed to pball and showing something sufficiently appealing to generate active interest but is that the goal of being on TV? Only indirectly, IMO. And what percentage of those so exposed need to "convert" to make that a success?

How many peeps does it take to make a new release movie a success? The gold standard is 100 million gross. Thats around 15 million tickets sold. If that level of success is reached in US alone that means no more than 5% of the population saw this huge success. And even though everyone, mostly, enjoys movies and everyone is the civilized world knows what movies are most successful movies have the ever-loving crap promoted out of them in order to get peeps to go see them.

So where on the scale does "success" reside for Pball? Seems to me very modest numbers translates into success.

On a related note the best thing pball can do in the US is support and promote the college and high school paintball effort. It would remove the stigma of pball at a grassroots level while simultaneously putting pball in a must-be-a-legit-sports environment and introduce the target demographic to precisely the sort of pball the Pro crowd and pro-TV crowd want to promote.

 

[Ben Frain]

Robbo, my point though is not the people on the sideline watching (where you can point your eyes whereever you like), that's a totally different kettle of fish, I'm just talking about seeing it on TV, whether Xball, 7man or whatever.

The site players you talk about are already potential tournament converts as they are already at a paintball site.

I'm talking about an average Joe sat at home, seeing paintball for the first time on TV. Is that going to make him want to go play more or less than a mate of his who plays tournament paintball telling him how good it is and that he should give it a go?

If the aim is to grow tournament paintball by increasing the amount of players, can this result be achieved more effectively (price to performance) by player to person promotion (them telling people how good tournament paintball is) or by random TV coverage such as ESPN etc?

EDIT: Baca Loco beat me to it!

 

[Robbo]

Originally posted by duffistuta
>>>I tell you this much, and I will use an average response that I have............................

.............................>>>You honestly think a few of your biking friend's reactions is more credible than the hundreds of rentals I have seen over the past 3 years whilst training at Nottingham and Leicester??

I ain't having that for one single second, no way

>>>I am saying that they are one and the same thing.

I gotta show you how to re work the quote facilities on this site Steve, anyway they ain't the same thing because my sample is much larger for one and also more representative of the nation's young male.
My first point is unargubale but I believe my second point in saying that my sample is much more representative of the public is based upon the notion that more young guys have played paintball than have atempted flying down Mount Everest.

 

[duffistuta]

Yeah, I dunno quite what happened there...

The point I was trying to make was that my mates have been in the exactly the same position as your rentals and behaved the same way as your rentals - but not gone any further than interest. And I bet good money that none of your hundreds of rentals went further either. Showing interest in stuff like that doesn't surprise me as I have said, it is following it up that counts, and as we all know, currently people don't.

You believe that if the correct infrastructure is in place and the awareness levels are increased, they will.

I do not.

 

[Kylistics]

i said this plenty times.

paintball and tv is baaaaaaaaaad. if anyone on here thinks that if paintball gets on tv (and is followed by millions, like football) they will be on tv playin paintball they are dead wrong.

part of the reason i dont want paintball on tv, is cos it will generate a lot more interest, meanin a lot more players with lots more natural ability will come along and beat the **** outta me.

so i dont really care about paintball and tv.

know what i mean

 

[Robbo]

Originally posted by Ben Frain
Robbo, my point though is not the people on the sideline watching (where you can point your eyes whereever you like), that's a totally different kettle of fish, I'm just talking about seeing it on TV, whether Xball, 7man or whatever.

If these players don't wanna watch, then they just go back to the safety zone, nobody is forcing them to watch mate.
As for what I now understand you to be saying, which i will apologise for now if I got it wrong, then i think in its present style of presentation, I think you are correct.
I watched the PA thingy a few months ago as I said before in another post and with no disrespect intended to anyone, it sucked. We have no chance if we go about portraying the sport along those lines, no chance, and it wasn't just the PA production because that high dollar Dick Clark thingy also sucked ass.


The site players you talk about are already potential tournament converts as they are already at a paintball site.

I would contest, no they ain't because nearly 800,000 people have played at sites and I don't think it's so much of an interest in Paintball as an opportuntiy for a social occasion that just 'happens' to be on a paintball site, I think you realise what I am geting at here.

I'm talking about an average Joe sat at home, seeing paintball for the first time on TV. Is that going to make him want to go play more or less than a mate of his who plays tournament paintball telling him how good it is and that he should give it a go?

Agreed 100%


If the aim is to grow tournament paintball by increasing the amount of players, can this result be achieved more effectively (price to performance) by player to person promotion (them telling people how good tournament paintball is) or by random TV coverage such as ESPN etc?

I am saying we need to cultivate those 800.000, we need to educate them on site with DVD's (or whatever) of our sport played at the highest levels.
Showing protracted tourney productions is not where it's at here because we need to showcase edited 'best bits' of paintball.
We need to create the desire and that desire is then expresed by the playing of tournaments and I am sure we can create that desire by showcasing our sport better.

 

[jeff]

I think you are both missing the point.

The point is that they WATCHED.

What does T.V want?

VIEWERS. and what do viewers attract?

ADVERTISING...and where do those advertising bucks go?

A proportion will go back into the game.

So....paintball is interesting to the viewer if presented the right way but it wont be the mass conversion tool that people are talking about. It will be a tool to generate cash which will hopefully lead to growth.

did that make sense???



**edit** you old guys type too fast!!!