The Town of Odyssey

When you see what this is about please don't stop reading if you're not a big football fan, that's actually exactly the point of it.

This Thursday, November 16th, NBC is experimenting with using a drastically different camera setup for the whole broadcast of the Thursday Night Football game. It's going to show the plays from the behind the offense, looking down the field, instead of the usual side view looking across. This is, so far, planned to just be a one time event, so it would be cool to get people together for it anyway, but the nature of what it is presents an opportunity to do something very interesting and actually meaningful in addition to just hanging out for fun.

The premise for changing the camera is that this view will make the broadcast more engaging for viewers. Football fans will have a different look at how the plays develop, and non football fans will have their interest rekindled because it's something completely different than what has ever been done before. I am very interested to see if that turns out to be true, so I want to hold a focus group viewing party for this game so we can have several people from varied levels of football fandom watch the broadcast and share their impressions and if it makes the game any more interesting, less interesting, or doesn't really change their previous opinion.

So if you're reading this, regardless of whether you usually watch football or not, on Thursday night please log into the Chatroom and join #NFL for at least a while. The game starts around 8:30 ET and should be on for about three hours. If you're available for any time in that span please come by, I'm legitimately interested in seeing what as many people as possible think. The game is on NBC, free tv, so everyone should be able to watch. It's also streamed for free if you have Amazon Prime.

Everyone is invited to join, opinions from any amount of previous experience with football games is desired. People who have watched at least a few before but are generally apathetic to disinterested, people who watch a lot of games and really enjoy it, even people who have never watched a game before, all different viewpoints on a regular broadcast providing unique positions to experience this broadcast from and compare reactions.

Hmm, I don't know if I will be able to make it, but I'll try. It sounds interesting and I have decided to learn the intricacies of American football this year. (I totally don't want to do that so that I can understand what makes a good player and with that knowledge start following Fantasy Football with a chance of winning. No, I'm totally not competitive. Of course not, what are you thinking?)

That does sound interesting. I have a commitment Thursday evening, but I might be able to see part of it. I pretty much just watch part of the Super Bowl and consider that a sufficient quantity of NFL time for me for the year but your description did make me curious, bookworm!

Bumped for visibility. This is tonight.

New info on what to expect. It's going to be a very interesting experience.

-- 17 Nov 2017 11:04 am --

Had a few people come by, thanks for participating! A couple others that planned to try joining couldn't make it unfortunately.

Consensus opinion was "meh". It was interesting to try out for a game, and wasn't awful, but no one found it significantly enhancing the viewing experience or preferable to the traditional camera setup.

Transcript of full reactions will be posted in the NFL chat thread at some point.

The game recap video shows how some plays looked if you missed it live:

I really wanted to watch and also be in the chat, but I'm an old man and went to bed early last night.

I will check out the transcript, though.

It's happening again tonight. Surprising to me, since our collective meh was a mild reaction; the vast majority of opinions I saw were intensely negative. But apparently they 'tweaked' the format since the first try.

I can't watch this one live unfortunately, but I'll be recording it to check out later. I'm interested to see what is different from before and if it really makes a difference.