Paintball has been televised in the UK, off the top ofmy head there were:
Mission Paintball - woodsball with a tournament-ish based final
X-Fire - 'Game show'
A European tournament a couple of years ago
Mission Paintball has been repeated a lot over the years, it was a late night sattelite/cable show, and has been repeated at varying late night sots. The opinion of the makers is they spent the money making it, and have a programme that people will watch every now and then.
X-Fire was probably shown once, and I have only ever seen it again on Virgins on demand for about a month.
I watched bit of the Euro tournament, there were a few nights of it, but it appeared to be repeated a fair bit at the time. I'm not heavily interested so it was partly the novelty of paintball on TV and partly a look at tourney style play.
To follow the flow of a game in the woods or a scenario there needs to be a lot of cameras, an enormous amount of editing and making sure what it shown brings some interest - e.g. following the flow of the game which is partly action and partly 'scenario' tasks.
If it worked this could be watchable by the general public.
For a tournament the camera work can be easier as with any sport in a set area. However most sports have a focal point. In paintball everyone would have to be on camera, preferably jumping from shooter to eliminatee. Otherwise its a load of people shooting at each other with the occasional runner, and hopefully a flag run at the end.
This is of passing interest to probably a fair number of the general public. But with no direct interest in teams then it would not hold attention.
e.g. Almost the entire country gets worked up about the world cup, a lot of people watch the premier league, Sunday league and school football get local interest (mostly from direct connections) but wouldn't make great television.
In contrast to that I used to watch American football. The best game I ever saw was when the pros went on strike and college football was televised internationaly. They clearly put in effort and it was exciting TV even though I had no interest in what way the result was. After that 'pro' football became boring.
