We need to change the way we market this game to gain popularity.
Tf.tv and our broader community needs to reach out to:
Server providers (tragic has shown how successful this can be), Pub server communities (lotus has a HL team now), and actual companies to see if they'd be happy running adds with us. All we'd need is some open source techno music, and a 10 second fade in fade out of a logo and link for tragic or iT, or any other community org. It helps tf.tv because it could demonstrate ad-viewing potential (these could be stored on a youtube playlist) as well as help the community generally by advertising various orgs as well as Tf.tv. I'm sure razer and etc would he happy if somebody just said "hey bro, we'd like to run some adds for you on our casts of tf2" this also opens avenues for individual players to get involved in marketing - admit it, if b4nny said "I love this mouse" at least some small portion of the community's opinions on that product would change - which is one way to regain MGO attention.
We also need to restructure the way we do casts. Several streamers other than Truktruk need to be enlisted to constantly rebroadcast content at set times so people can tune in regularly from the EU and NA scenes.
I like skyride's intro screen, but we need to start running content at the start - tragic could make a crappy add for himself, somebody could make an add for various other things and that's what'd run prior to the game starting, and if some technical problems happen, instead of forcing the casters to jabber at each other for 30+ minutes, we should have some sort of back up plan, like a playlist of popular frag/jump movies or adds that help the community.
We should also get casters and teams a bit closer together to facilitate a proper half-time where adds could be run or a few frag videos (you only need 5 mins for this) instead of forcing casters to again talk forever and risk saying something silly or causing viewers to lose interest.
Just some ideas blurted onto forum page.
I think TF2 as a comp scene is fine, although the skill level may decrease slightly in the lower divisions because of the influx of new people we're going to see over the next 2-3 seasons as HL players cross over and new people get drawn in thanks to Tip o' hats, and i46/i49 and of course LAN interest in general.