The Race!

Is anyone else delighted to see Gul'dan hold on into the second week?

Star Augur Etraeus has seen off most of the US contingent and Grand Magistrix Elisande held the mighty Method at bay for a long time but, at the time of writing, three EU guilds are bashing their heads against the final boss in Nighthold, Gul'dan.

Even though it wouldn't bode well for my own chances of killing him further down the line, I want the race in every tier to last at least into the second week and maybe even the third (if the difficulty curve is quite smooth, not in this case).
It feels so anticlimactic when they die in the first week, particularly if it is a lore-laden character like Gul'dan.
Keep fighting Gul'dan!

Raiding as an e-sport...

There has also been a lot of debate about how to market and broadcast the world first race and, as usual, I'm late to the party but have some thoughts on the subject...

Who would even watch it?

Up to this point, these guilds have put in well over 100 hours of raiding each and killed 9 bosses with wipes numbering in the thousands!
How do you make that worth watching?

The first thought that springs to mind is... Golf!
At first glance, you may not see many similarities between mythic raiding and golf but stick with me on this one.

Golf suffers from some very similar issues when it comes to broadcasting:
1. There are long periods of inactivity or standard play between each moment of greatness.
2. You have no real idea when those moments of greatness are going to come.
3. A complete tournament encompasses many hours of playing across multiple days.

Golf gets round these issues by a system of mass simultaneous broadcasting of every golfer and every shot they play, while only showing one at any time to the audience.

This must be a nightmare for the producer but they do a fantastic job of showing as many 'live' shots as possible while slotting in some recordings of recent shots they missed.

This works by focussing on the leaders of the tournament, or some superstar, for almost all of their shots while jumping around the course to other players in the downtime in between.

It flows incredibly well on screen as the coverage continues almost non-stop.  When there is an inevitable lull in the action, it is filled in a variety of ways... scoreboard and recap, golfer interviews, previews of upcoming holes and replays of great play earlier in the day amongst other things.

This is the model I would use as a base.

There would clearly need to be some tweaks though, to both the coverage style and the approach of the competitors.
The privacy walls between guilds would come tumbling down for a start but this may make the race both tighter and faster as tactics are copied and iterated upon much more quickly.

The sheer scale of an event which runs pretty much continuously (if you can get into the raid instance hehe) for a week or more, across so many timezones, could make it virtually impossible to cast but a major problem would be having no idea when it would actually end! 
Xavius died in a die while we are now on day 9/10 for Gul'dan.

It would clearly be a massive undertaking demanding incredible resources which makes it highly unlikely to be done by any third party.  If it's going to be done, Blizzard will probably have to do it themselves.

Before they consider allocating so many resources though, they would still have to answer the question...
Who would even watch it?