Just found out from Daryl (our badminton coach) that
Badminton is pretty much the last sport that still doesn't use rally scoring: volleyball made the transition a few years ago. Traditional scoring formats for volleyball and badminton is thus: there are non-scoring side-outs/faults when the faulting party did not hold service. In short, point is only earned on service, and that the winning of a shot by a non-serving party forces a change of service (or in the case of doubles badminton, change from first to second server).
Rally point scoring, on the other hand, gives points to every fault, in addition to possibility of service changes. Which means that to every service is attached a point, and the maximum number of serves possible in a game is, roughly speaking, twice the required winning score.
The rally scoring system was introduced to volleyball (as it is to badminton now) to make the games broadcastable on TV. Unlike sports with rally scoring, the length of a typical badminton game is really unpredictable. Between two good singles defending-style players, it is quite possible that 15 minutes into the first game, after 20 changes of serves, the score is still held at 0-0. From the point-of-view of the non-player, that makes the games boring and uninteresting. Furthermore, between to good players, fifty or so serves are often needed to earn the 15 points for the winner.
The rally scoring makes some additional changes. Instead of to 15, the game plays to 21. Instead of a 3 point tie breaker at 14, if the two parties are tied at 20, then it is who ever gets a two point lead wins. If the game goes until 29-29, then whoever gets 30 wins. Thus, realistically, the game is limited to 59 serves total, which allows for a pretty good estimate that a game ends in 1 hour, and a match no longer than 3, with a half-hour game, 1 hour match being the norm.
Seeing, this, there might be, in the near future, commercial broadcast in the US of badminton matches. That would be nice.
In the past, there have been several different incidents in which countries pushed for changes in the scoring system to make more commercial sense in the IBF. They have always, until now, been blocked by the east Asian countries (Taiwan, China, Korea, Indonesia). But surprisingly, this new change comes with the full support of the Europeans and the Asians alike, and the rest of the world (meaning, the US) doesn't have much preference in it, so it is likely, in Daryl's point of view, that after the trial period ends in May this year, the IBF officially announces the change of scoring for international play.
The one thing that is going to change because of the rule-change: service would be a lot less important. It used to be that if a player cannot get a good serve, he would never be able to compete on a high level, because bad serves almost always get broken in one or two returns, and without winning serves, there's no way to earn points. But with the change now, it is quite possible for people who are, say, excellent at smashes and drops to win a match serving second, even if they cannot put up a nice deep serve for the love of their lives. To illustrate that, we imagine a player who cannot serve at all, but can have ace returns on every shot served to him. Then, he would win the game by 30-29 if he serves second, and would probably lose 29-30 if he serves first.... (that reminds me of the game of tennis in Alexander Smith's Portuguese Irregular Verbs)