Game of Drones Set To Bring Drone Sports To Your TV

by
December 19, 2014

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.

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Michael Tunney is a managing editor at Contently. He has also worked on marketing campaigns for bestselling authors like Robert Greene, Ryan Holiday, and James Altucher. Follow him on Twitter @mike_tunney.

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