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Game of Drones Set To Bring Drone Sports To Your TV

As this nation entered the 21st century, few could have predicted the little-known show BattleBots would plant the seeds for the next evolution of brutal robotic combat. Sure, BattleBots only aired for three years on Comedy Central and was watched by approximately three people, but it is now clear the show was ahead of its time with the emergence of the Aerial Sports League (ASL) this year.

The founder of the ASL, Marque Cornblatt, is also the founder of Game of Drones, a hardware company that manufactures some of the booming industry’s most resilient drones. Priced at $650, The Game of Drones Actions Sports Airframes are currently sold out on the company’s website. They are nothing to trifle with—built to withstand water, fire, and extreme impacts. In the below video you can even see a man shooting one with a shotgun.

 

After starting in a local barn with friends, Cornblatt’s ASL is now touring around the country. “Originally, we thought the sports league was a way to promote the hardware, but in a way, the league’s become the driving force,” said Cornblatt in an interview with Betabeat. With the FAA anticipating over 7,500 civilian drones to be flying in American airspaces by 2018, it’s a league that’s almost certain to flourish in the coming years.

According to Betabeat, the rules of the game are simple. Each drone operator starts with three points and loses one every time their drone hits the ground. The first person to zero loses. In his interview with Betabeat, Cornblatt said he sees television as the next logical step for drone sports. “I see us doing a permanent show in Vegas, but we’re going to have a show on TV very soon. It’s an inevitability—the TV show frames itself around the development around that Vegas product.” With behemoths like Amazon making drones a central part of their future business, it’s clear that drones will be part of our future as well. Whether an ASL TV show will have the same short-lived fate as BattleBots remains to be seen, but the company does have a head start in capturing the lion’s share of an exploding market.

(Header image via Game of Drones)

IOC Set To Launch 24/7 Olympics Channel

For an organization known more recently for its spotty human rights record than forward thinking, the IOC surprised many last week, including its own president, Thomas Bach, when they adopted the 40-point “Olympic Agenda 2020” program proposed by the IOC president.

Included in the series of reforms is a plan to develop an over-the-top digital TV channel to begin broadcasting as early as 2015. The AP reported that the channel will cost around $600 million to create, with the hope that the IOC would recoup their investment after 10 years. The channel’s programming won’t interfere with the Universal Sports Network in the US, which already provides round-the-clock coverage of the Olympic games, including live events, to more than 60 million cable subscribers. Said to be based on the National Geographic Channel model, the channel will broadcast from the archives of past Olympic games, as well as provide Olympic news and other non-Olympic sporting events.

It remains to be seen how much interest there will be for the channel, given that the network will be unable to broadcast live events due to previous agreements with networks like NBC. Recent sports networks like NBA TV, the NFL Network, and the Pac-12 Network have all started with the archives and news format, but included live broadcasts to draw in initial viewers. There is also a concern that a 24-7 Olympics network will lessen the novelty for games that are held once every four years. But for an organization that has been much maligned recently, the new channel is a worthwhile bet to recapture some of its lost relevance, especially with a younger audience that is accustomed to this type of programming.

(Header image via adrian8_8)