^ So, in that case, in order to do our part in promoting the sport of badminton, we should have a betting forum.
Fees depend on the club you get in. You can get into a tennis club or association and only pay 200$ a year, play all you want. In Europe, we mostly play with feathers with 2 to 3 shuttlecocks per match, making Badminton more expensive than tennis. Badminton also has betting and gambling involved, but less popular than football or horse racing. We can invoke any number of reasons why badminton isn't as popular as other sports, but the main culprits are the media and investors not willing to invest their time and money in it. If a wealthy investor promoted a badminton US Open with 2 million in prize fee or at least the same as a Tennis major open, market it everywhere, in the radio, TV, newspaper, then does the same for Canada open, it make all the the other SSP look like a bunch of amateur winning. Gambling will multiply, more investors will be attracted, more people drawn to the sports whether they play it or not. Like everything, badminton needs to sell themselves not by changing the score or rules as kwun points out, but by marketing it. Badminton is a great product, its just not marketed and invested enough.
Who controls or influences who? . But really BWF can take lessons from ITTF to learn on how to broadcast live streaming those important tournaments on own arrangements instead of solely relying on those major TV stations to cover badminton live or youtube for the task. It may be relatively simple and affordable steps to copy the successes of table tennis live streaming coverage as seen in ITTV (http://ittf.com/ittv/) and avoid the coverage blackout in order to reach the badminton fans world wide. Even with this ITTV live streaming, table tennis is still covered by more live TV broadcast than badminton. Another example is volleyball, they have their own live streaming arrangement for those major volleyball tournaments! Just check FIVB WEB TV at http://www.fivb.org/EN/Volleyball/index.asp As I said repeatedly the mainstream media and TV networks incl. those major sport channels are highly concentrated on few corporations, and it's "the media" who controls and dictates in large portion what to be broadcast, watched, read... by the population and not the other way round! It's essentially a fundamental question who controls or influences who! How can badminton tournaments reach their fans world wide if the major sport channels simply do not want to broadcast them or just cover them quite limitedly and instead flood the world population with the soccer, golf, tennis, F1 & motor racing, boxing, NFL, NBA and so forth... in my case, I just turn off my teevee or switch to other non-sport channels or go to video streaming if any... I don't like to watch those "force-fed" contents incl. sports that I don't enjoy but most people will adapt to them. One should ask oneself honestly whether those sports are really that popular or simply because most consumers do not have other choices...okay, soccer is a real deal but I ain't that sure for the rest. The comparison made with tennis is not appropriate. Tennis is one of "the crown jewel" sports of the present establishment/system, in no way badminton can ever compete with tennis in terms of media coverage and sponsorship money. And measuring the sport popularity solely based on $ amount is often misleading...for those established corporations/financiers are willingly spending big money on the crown jewels but none or just meager amount on those non-chosen sports! Setting the badminton target to reach the world wide exposure and reach popularity as good as table tennis is much more reasonable and workable. Lets hope the current BWF executives do not keep on thinking to tweak the game and put in the various reins into the sport rendering it into a big joke and slow, gradual but a sure suicide action. For instance I feel the regulating body of BWF put too many restrictions on "correct serve", players are often faulted at serving without they really grasp the precise violations they made and those restrictions definitely do not make the badminton more interesting to watch... i really detest seeing players faulted at serve.
kelana is right. Solving the service inconsistent rulings problem is more important than revamping the scoring system or the Thomas/Uber cup format.
Don't change the format: Jorgensen by lim teik huat Friday May 23, 2014 http://www.thestar.com.my/Sport/Badminton/2014/05/23/Dont-change-the-format-Jorgensen/ Excerpts: “It is ridiculous to shorten the ties. The current format gives inspiration to the younger players. They look forward to playing and it’s amazing when you look at them taking all the pressure. “If you reduce the number of matches, it is only the experienced players who will be fielded,” said reigning European singles champion Jorgensen. On the proposal to do away with the current 21-point best-of-three-game scoring format to make it more exciting for the fans, Jorgensen felt that this too “is a bad idea”. “If what I was doing outside (playing) is not exciting enough, then I don’t know what is exciting,” he said.
