Sport Today

There were too many good things to name them all.  Great job.  And I figure
you are working on things for next year, so let me throw out a few ideas
(and believe me, these are not criticisms at all).

1. Max Eberle's walk-around was great.  This would be some great filler
between matches.

2. Ring Games on the feature table every night except when the finals for
one of the events are playing.

3. Plug some product sponsors in between matches.  I realize people don't
always love getting commercials in a PPV broadcast, but some info sessions
about products, technology, etc., that could be pre-recorded and piped in
when necessary would be a good filler as well.

4. Remind your broadcasters they are speaking to a live audience.  They need
to identify themselves at the beginning, during and at the end of the
broadcast.  They also need to sign-off a bit more cleanly.  A nice 1-2
minute summary as well as a mention of next events and times would be great.

5. Have a computer in the booth tied into the chat rooms.  Your audience is
live, they have questions.  Someone could be monitoring that and posing
questions to the broadcasters (kinda like talk radio).

6. Have some brief, pre-match interviews with the players.  Play part of it
and save a few player sound bites that you can interject during the play.

7. Talk about things outside of the tournament but other than the ***.
Nick Varner's condition would be a great example.

8. The flash media stuff to the right of the match screen was maddening to
watch.  I had to drag that off the right side of my screen it was so
distracting.  I agree that the sponsor's paid to have coverage, but that did
detract.

9. Is there a way to have your computer based pairing stuff get pushed out
to a web site as well.  AZ Billards was way behind.  The best place to get
info about upcoming stuff was the chatrooms from someone that was watching
when it was said.

10. It might be nice to monitor the number of people watching via the
webcasts and have the broadcasters report that number.  It seems the arena
space can only handle a few hundred people - was the real number of live
watchers more like 600 or 6000.

Again, thanks for providing all of us that couldn't make it a chance to be
there.

--Jim

I've always enjoyed Mataya in the booth, but he's been out of the game for a
bit and was possibly hitting a few beers during his work hours.

Fred

--
Bob Johnson, Denver, Co.

For a first time thing it was great.  Rob had to have put
in a ton of hours.  There are a few things to improve on or change
and Rob said that he already had ideas and thoughts about changes.
I thought the video was pretty good.  I am not that hip to the technology
of webcasts but I was happy with it.  Many thanks to Rob.

My only real suggestions would be to have interviews, instruction
or some old timers tell a few tales in between matches.  I understood the
format and did not understand people complaining about not knowing the
schedule.
I look forward to the next one

Hugh Arnold"LCS"
commentator in the making

I really enjoyed the coverage and would not hesistate to do a similar
thing for additional tournaments. The price point of $9.95 was
extremely reasonable and perhaps it was too low. I think the producers
kept it low because this was new and no one knew what to expect, but
now that they have shown me what this is about, I for one would  not
flinch at a higher price point such as $19.95.

Charging more could open up alot of options, like higher bandwidth
streams. I would have really enjoyed it if there was a 600k stream
that could have allowed for fullscreen blowup with less pixelation.
Another idea is to possibly offer two streams, one with the action and
the other as a screen to show instant replays, replays of matches that
occurred earlier or possibly table two action with natural sound and
no commentary (or maybe commentary if this can be cost effective. What
would have really given you the flavor of being at the tournament
would have been to have a main accustats table, but then also 3-4
other tables with an overhead cam. You could pick through and watch
different matches, just as if you were there. I realize that this
presents problems with equipment and lighting, but I for one would
accept lower quality lighting and single camera if it meant i could
skip through 5 matches instead of just the one offered. Giving the
viewers an option to replay one of X number of matches instead of the
live stream would also be well received I believe. There were
definitely times during the DCC that I was wishing I could have been
watching a match that was broadcast earlier than the one that was
being offered.

David Uwate