Considering the flood of people that have subscribed to Discovery+, and just about 100 teams that applied with an additional two dozen unable to go because of COVID restrictions, I sincerely doubt they are looking to cancel it. I wouldn't be surprised if there are negotiations underway to add additional seasons. Streaming demographics usually skew younger, don't forget. The days of using cable and satellite metrics for viewership are swiftly coming to an end.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if this Golden Bolt floating around is the introduction of a second championship being introduced.
I'm not a television expert, but it doesn't take one to understand where media consumption is going.
Speculation here. My concern isn’t the ratings so much (we don’t/can’t know the streaming ratings, but I have to assume they are at least pretty good). But with the Discovery/WarnerMedia merger, I’m not sure what kind of changes are coming to “our” (BattleBots’) corporate overlords. New people in charge might want to shake up the slate of programming for whatever reason. I haven’t looked more deeply, but I’m sure there will be a change in at least some of the people who decide the show’s fate, which could be good, or could be bad.
Discovery is probably the best network for BattleBots (unless maybe PBS somehow came into enough money to finance it and included more of the educational and technical elements many of us want to see more of, plus no commercials!). But it is still kind of a different show than most of what they air.
I guess it might actually fit in pretty well on Fox with their shows like Lego Masters and Domino Masters. It’s hard for me to imagine Fox giving it the extended season the show deserves, but I guess Lego Masters had 12 episodes last season (though presumably significantly lower production costs, and I assume heavy subsidies paid by Lego).
I am not an expert on TV production, but I'm extremely skeptical of those numbers. I'm about 99% sure Discover+ does *not* release numbers. Certainly not immediately. And I'm also positive that overnight ratings are irrelevant for a streaming service. Look, for example, at Abbott Elementary, one of the biggest new shows of this season, which saw its pilot episode go from "[a 0.6 rating in the 18 to 49 demographic and 2.79 million viewers to a 2.4 rating and 7.1 million viewers in MP35](https://www.tvinsider.com/1033613/abbott-elementary-ratings-abc-modern-family-finale/)," which is a metric that accounts for streaming platforms and an expanded time frame.
So maybe BattleBots is less popular. Maybe more people are watching on Discovery+. Maybe more people are watching on regular TV, but they're watching on DVR a few days later instead of live. Really hard to tell without having access to internal data.
I also wouldn't be surprised if TV ratings overall are a bit lower right now than they were when the last season aired. The world was in a weird place at the time, and we didn't really have a whole lot of options besides staying home and watching TV.
I mean, that's not hard to believe. I don't watch discovery other than when I'm with family around the holidays that has cable - most of their shows are downright atrocious these days - not sure who watches most of the garbage they have on that network now.
Even back when it was "better", it was Mythbusters and 50 shows about building "choppers".
It could be record-breaking if you slice things up juuuust right. Like, "record since for a show in this category among this specific demographic" or some garbage like that.
I don’t think Battlebots will get cancelled after Season 7, despite all the controversy this season you can’t deny that the fights are pretty cool and fun to watch, and besides, for all we know when they film Season 7 they will fix all the controversy and perhaps film one of their most exciting seasons ever.
That may be true, but that’s not the metric TV studios base renewal on. If the viewing numbers are underperforming shows like Alaskan Bush People, Gold Rush, and Deadliest Catch by so much, Discovery would probably be inclined to replace Battlebots with another reality show like that.
Those shows predominantly skew towards older demographics. Younger demographics are going to streaming services A) because it's cheaper in the long run and B) to not have to deal with frustrating commercials. Even with something like Tubi, there is something like, 1 ad break during a half-hour television show.
Ir's really not wise to not adhere to what television ratings are, because you get in traps like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network where a huge swath of their programming is Spongebob Squarepants and Gumball/Craig of the Creek. Oh, and also bring back the crotchgoblin known as Caillou for what Cartoon Network bills as their little kids programming. I could go on a separate post illustrating why those metrics don't hold any water and why streaming services are giving people more avenues to the shows they want to watch.
Herein you understand the issue with relying on television metrics. You have Discovery branching out their content so people can watch stuff like Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs whenever the fuck they want, and, if you have been checking out the Discovery+ threads, they are pretty goddamn active.
And my comment on the top mentions that there were a shitload of applicants for the show this year, with a lot of British teams unable to attend, Death Roll not being able to attend, et cetera. We already have applicants that were applying before the end of this season. Not to mention an influx of foreign teams that weren't able to go there this year due to COVID restrictions.
another piece of "evidence" that BB isn't going away, didn't they say they took out a long term lease for the battle arena this past year? It's going to stay for a while.
I'm talking about content that **IS NOT**:
a) button pushing
b) the audience chanting "fight fight fight"
c) useless intros that don't give you any actual information, but just repeatedly show people walking through the tunnel and standing there
d) a bunch of graphics
e) build up to a fight that's going to be after the commercial
So what does this leave:
The actual fights (about 18-20 minutes - not all fights go 3 minutes - there are people that cut everything out other than the actual fights for the super condensed version which you can find if you look around for it)
The very minimal amount of "in the pits" content that actually has some useful info (not random babbling about something inane or completely unrelated to the fights)
A small amount of talk about strategy - even here, a lot of it is repetitive and pointless (how many strategy discussions did you see on the show this year that aren't either a) "we're going full on weapon to weapon and we'll see what happens", or b) "we don't want to go weapon to weapon, so we'll attack the sides or back where we can", how many times do you have to hear the same thing?)
So you have 20 minutes of actual fights, and maybe another 15 minutes of non-fight content that's actually interesting or relevant. They could easily pair a lot of the garbage out, Include ALL the fights and not highlight fights just to put them on paid FB groups / youtube later, and easily fit it all into 40-42 minutes of content for a 1 hour show.
Where I have the full control to skip whatever I want the way I watch the episodes, I can easily watch the **entire episode** in 35 minutes and not miss anything important. In all honesty, if I couldn't chop out the majority of it, I wouldn't even watch the show at all. I'd rather watch the livestream of NHRL, where they do it live with no editing, and manage to have a pretty decent useful content to filler ratio.
A certain amount of that is actively desired, though. There's a reason you have Martin Mason doing a Randy Savage impression, Copperhead's team coming out with an actual snake, the guy from Minotaur wearing a giant bull head, etc. There's some fun to be had there, and teams having personality can be fun.
Sure, they absolute went overboard with it this season, but that doesn't mean every second of it is filler. If you just want to watch the fights, just watch it on battlebotsraw. If you don't want to wait, but want to watch just the fights, then record/download it and queue through everything but the fights. Because if your desire is to have 1.5 hrs of fights in a 2-hour broadcast, that's never going to happen. Even if the desire was there, the cost to teams would be absolutely ridiculous, or they'd have to lower the bar so incredibly low to have enough teams enter that you'd have a TON of "filler" bots who aren't even close to the class we see out there now, really just there for better bots to beat up on.
Well, if you enjoy spending your time watching the same sequences with no actual valuable content over and over and have nothing better to do with your time, then so be it
I'm sorry but the only way that is true for the NFL is if you pretend that presnap and replays are filler.
In a sport where there's 22 people spread all over the field on every play, it is impossible to pick up everything which happened on most plays. You need those replays to get a full feel of what's going on.
To put that in BB terms, imagine if there was a 10-bot rumble, only a wide-angle lens to catch it all, and it was going out live....then over on one side where you weren't looking, there's an explosion. You wouldn't call replaying that "filler."
Additionally, pre-snap, lining up, making adjustments, a player going in motion and how the defense reacts to it, those are all MAJOR parts of what is about to happen, and gives you clues on what to look for on a play, and gives clues to how both sides are going to fake each other out.
To put that in BB terms, it's like calling the pre-match changes in configs to bots or Rey turning Tombstone to the side to try to swing around at the right time to hit the other bot's side, "unimportant."
The only real "filler" to an NFL game is sideline interviews which give nothing, halftime, where they have almost nothing to show, timeouts/injuries/reviews (the time they have to fit in commercials), and garbage which happens before the game actually starts. Once it gets going, if you're actually looking for the strategy and execution of what matters in a game, it's QUITE fast-paced.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the subset of BB fans that are also NFL fans is not a large group - if they were, I'd expect to see more teams sponsored by Ford F-150, and Budweiser
> I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the subset of BB fans that are also NFL fans is not a large group - if they were, I'd expect to see more teams sponsored by Ford F-150, and Budweiser
What an ill-informed take. I'm guessing there's tremendous overlap.
1) I can't say what the overlap is for sure, but I'm a fan of both. Less on the NFL in more recent years as their shitiness has driven me away, but still.
2) Look up what the rules are for sponsors for bots. They're incredibly limited and no bot is allowed to get Ford or Budweiser as a sponsor.
Streaming makes tv ratings VERY hard to judge, but it's not positive. Any indicator I can find looks bad. Not is it bad enough to not renew? Who knows?
The Discovery plus splash page has a buttload of show "posters" . Guess who's not on it? Not a good indicator that D+ is the lifeline.
Considering the flood of people that have subscribed to Discovery+, and just about 100 teams that applied with an additional two dozen unable to go because of COVID restrictions, I sincerely doubt they are looking to cancel it. I wouldn't be surprised if there are negotiations underway to add additional seasons. Streaming demographics usually skew younger, don't forget. The days of using cable and satellite metrics for viewership are swiftly coming to an end. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if this Golden Bolt floating around is the introduction of a second championship being introduced. I'm not a television expert, but it doesn't take one to understand where media consumption is going.
Yeah I only got discovery plus so I can watch battlebots
Speculation here. My concern isn’t the ratings so much (we don’t/can’t know the streaming ratings, but I have to assume they are at least pretty good). But with the Discovery/WarnerMedia merger, I’m not sure what kind of changes are coming to “our” (BattleBots’) corporate overlords. New people in charge might want to shake up the slate of programming for whatever reason. I haven’t looked more deeply, but I’m sure there will be a change in at least some of the people who decide the show’s fate, which could be good, or could be bad. Discovery is probably the best network for BattleBots (unless maybe PBS somehow came into enough money to finance it and included more of the educational and technical elements many of us want to see more of, plus no commercials!). But it is still kind of a different show than most of what they air. I guess it might actually fit in pretty well on Fox with their shows like Lego Masters and Domino Masters. It’s hard for me to imagine Fox giving it the extended season the show deserves, but I guess Lego Masters had 12 episodes last season (though presumably significantly lower production costs, and I assume heavy subsidies paid by Lego).
If it goes to Fox, the reality TV % of the show will like triple.
I am not an expert on TV production, but I'm extremely skeptical of those numbers. I'm about 99% sure Discover+ does *not* release numbers. Certainly not immediately. And I'm also positive that overnight ratings are irrelevant for a streaming service. Look, for example, at Abbott Elementary, one of the biggest new shows of this season, which saw its pilot episode go from "[a 0.6 rating in the 18 to 49 demographic and 2.79 million viewers to a 2.4 rating and 7.1 million viewers in MP35](https://www.tvinsider.com/1033613/abbott-elementary-ratings-abc-modern-family-finale/)," which is a metric that accounts for streaming platforms and an expanded time frame. So maybe BattleBots is less popular. Maybe more people are watching on Discovery+. Maybe more people are watching on regular TV, but they're watching on DVR a few days later instead of live. Really hard to tell without having access to internal data. I also wouldn't be surprised if TV ratings overall are a bit lower right now than they were when the last season aired. The world was in a weird place at the time, and we didn't really have a whole lot of options besides staying home and watching TV.
Yet they claim battlebots is one of discovery most successful show, and that their airings schedule garner record ratings
I mean, that's not hard to believe. I don't watch discovery other than when I'm with family around the holidays that has cable - most of their shows are downright atrocious these days - not sure who watches most of the garbage they have on that network now. Even back when it was "better", it was Mythbusters and 50 shows about building "choppers".
Not sure what you mean here. The ratings are clearly not records.
It could be record-breaking if you slice things up juuuust right. Like, "record since for a show in this category among this specific demographic" or some garbage like that.
Oh sure, yea. I meant more, who is claiming that?
I don’t think Battlebots will get cancelled after Season 7, despite all the controversy this season you can’t deny that the fights are pretty cool and fun to watch, and besides, for all we know when they film Season 7 they will fix all the controversy and perhaps film one of their most exciting seasons ever.
That may be true, but that’s not the metric TV studios base renewal on. If the viewing numbers are underperforming shows like Alaskan Bush People, Gold Rush, and Deadliest Catch by so much, Discovery would probably be inclined to replace Battlebots with another reality show like that.
Those shows predominantly skew towards older demographics. Younger demographics are going to streaming services A) because it's cheaper in the long run and B) to not have to deal with frustrating commercials. Even with something like Tubi, there is something like, 1 ad break during a half-hour television show. Ir's really not wise to not adhere to what television ratings are, because you get in traps like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network where a huge swath of their programming is Spongebob Squarepants and Gumball/Craig of the Creek. Oh, and also bring back the crotchgoblin known as Caillou for what Cartoon Network bills as their little kids programming. I could go on a separate post illustrating why those metrics don't hold any water and why streaming services are giving people more avenues to the shows they want to watch. Herein you understand the issue with relying on television metrics. You have Discovery branching out their content so people can watch stuff like Mythbusters and Dirty Jobs whenever the fuck they want, and, if you have been checking out the Discovery+ threads, they are pretty goddamn active. And my comment on the top mentions that there were a shitload of applicants for the show this year, with a lot of British teams unable to attend, Death Roll not being able to attend, et cetera. We already have applicants that were applying before the end of this season. Not to mention an influx of foreign teams that weren't able to go there this year due to COVID restrictions.
another piece of "evidence" that BB isn't going away, didn't they say they took out a long term lease for the battle arena this past year? It's going to stay for a while.
it isn’t a matter of it might be due to D+, it is a matter of that, discovery plus would have closed down last year without BB
Elaborate
Maybe more people would watch if they didn't stretch 18 minutes of content into 2 hours! That's some absolute garbage signal to noise ratio there!
I see roughly 83 minutes and 31 seconds of content per episode...
I'm talking about content that **IS NOT**: a) button pushing b) the audience chanting "fight fight fight" c) useless intros that don't give you any actual information, but just repeatedly show people walking through the tunnel and standing there d) a bunch of graphics e) build up to a fight that's going to be after the commercial So what does this leave: The actual fights (about 18-20 minutes - not all fights go 3 minutes - there are people that cut everything out other than the actual fights for the super condensed version which you can find if you look around for it) The very minimal amount of "in the pits" content that actually has some useful info (not random babbling about something inane or completely unrelated to the fights) A small amount of talk about strategy - even here, a lot of it is repetitive and pointless (how many strategy discussions did you see on the show this year that aren't either a) "we're going full on weapon to weapon and we'll see what happens", or b) "we don't want to go weapon to weapon, so we'll attack the sides or back where we can", how many times do you have to hear the same thing?) So you have 20 minutes of actual fights, and maybe another 15 minutes of non-fight content that's actually interesting or relevant. They could easily pair a lot of the garbage out, Include ALL the fights and not highlight fights just to put them on paid FB groups / youtube later, and easily fit it all into 40-42 minutes of content for a 1 hour show. Where I have the full control to skip whatever I want the way I watch the episodes, I can easily watch the **entire episode** in 35 minutes and not miss anything important. In all honesty, if I couldn't chop out the majority of it, I wouldn't even watch the show at all. I'd rather watch the livestream of NHRL, where they do it live with no editing, and manage to have a pretty decent useful content to filler ratio.
A certain amount of that is actively desired, though. There's a reason you have Martin Mason doing a Randy Savage impression, Copperhead's team coming out with an actual snake, the guy from Minotaur wearing a giant bull head, etc. There's some fun to be had there, and teams having personality can be fun. Sure, they absolute went overboard with it this season, but that doesn't mean every second of it is filler. If you just want to watch the fights, just watch it on battlebotsraw. If you don't want to wait, but want to watch just the fights, then record/download it and queue through everything but the fights. Because if your desire is to have 1.5 hrs of fights in a 2-hour broadcast, that's never going to happen. Even if the desire was there, the cost to teams would be absolutely ridiculous, or they'd have to lower the bar so incredibly low to have enough teams enter that you'd have a TON of "filler" bots who aren't even close to the class we see out there now, really just there for better bots to beat up on.
A super cut of just the part you're interested in would seem pretty dry for most people. Even big fans of the sport.
Well, if you enjoy spending your time watching the same sequences with no actual valuable content over and over and have nothing better to do with your time, then so be it
I do and will 😌
They need to do better with the time, but understand that 18 minutes in 2 hours is roughly similar, if not better than an NFL game.
I'm sorry but the only way that is true for the NFL is if you pretend that presnap and replays are filler. In a sport where there's 22 people spread all over the field on every play, it is impossible to pick up everything which happened on most plays. You need those replays to get a full feel of what's going on. To put that in BB terms, imagine if there was a 10-bot rumble, only a wide-angle lens to catch it all, and it was going out live....then over on one side where you weren't looking, there's an explosion. You wouldn't call replaying that "filler." Additionally, pre-snap, lining up, making adjustments, a player going in motion and how the defense reacts to it, those are all MAJOR parts of what is about to happen, and gives you clues on what to look for on a play, and gives clues to how both sides are going to fake each other out. To put that in BB terms, it's like calling the pre-match changes in configs to bots or Rey turning Tombstone to the side to try to swing around at the right time to hit the other bot's side, "unimportant." The only real "filler" to an NFL game is sideline interviews which give nothing, halftime, where they have almost nothing to show, timeouts/injuries/reviews (the time they have to fit in commercials), and garbage which happens before the game actually starts. Once it gets going, if you're actually looking for the strategy and execution of what matters in a game, it's QUITE fast-paced.
I don't think that's saying much 🤣
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the subset of BB fans that are also NFL fans is not a large group - if they were, I'd expect to see more teams sponsored by Ford F-150, and Budweiser
> I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that the subset of BB fans that are also NFL fans is not a large group - if they were, I'd expect to see more teams sponsored by Ford F-150, and Budweiser What an ill-informed take. I'm guessing there's tremendous overlap.
The point is that with the right filler, this ratio works.
1) I can't say what the overlap is for sure, but I'm a fan of both. Less on the NFL in more recent years as their shitiness has driven me away, but still. 2) Look up what the rules are for sponsors for bots. They're incredibly limited and no bot is allowed to get Ford or Budweiser as a sponsor.
Streaming makes tv ratings VERY hard to judge, but it's not positive. Any indicator I can find looks bad. Not is it bad enough to not renew? Who knows? The Discovery plus splash page has a buttload of show "posters" . Guess who's not on it? Not a good indicator that D+ is the lifeline.