What a joke..Flotrack now has exclusive broadcasting rights to the NCAA XC Championship

NCAA got paid, bro. Nothing else matters.

This is horrible for the sports, every year I look forward to watching the NCAA meets because it is something that is streamed for free and is usually decent coverage. Now with Flotrack it is down to the few people who have the money to pay for their terrible coverage. I'm not sure how they are growing the sport by limiting the audience for the national championship to people who can pay to watch it.

Seriously? Is this verified? If so yet another step back. I will not pay for their substandard services.

very unfortunate

I was looking forward to watching...http://www.milesplit.com/articles/196822

divide and verify wrote:

Seriously? Is this verified? If so yet another step back. I will not pay for their substandard services.

Yup it's for real. Just checked the flopro site. But they don't even tell you what the monthly or annual fee are? Sign up now, pay later I guess.

awesome,

Was planning on watching also, but not a chance in heck I pay for FLOPRO.

Ill just follow the live results and twitter feeds instead.

These people are the biggest group of stumbling buffoons around. They can't even do their NCAA picks correctly...TWICE! The "announcers" are nothing short of insufferable. Key Flotrack phrases:

1) "in the mix"

2) "make it honest"

3) your pick of any ridiculous phrase

Paying to watch xc??! LOL. I'll read the updates/results here with some added troll humor/commentary

It's funny for all the hate flotrack gets here all the athletes interact with them and milepslit all the time, and letsrun? Well not so much, just envy I suppose?

Interestin wrote:

It's funny for all the hate flotrack gets here all the athletes interact with them and milepslit all the time, and letsrun? Well not so much, just envy I suppose?

how is it envy? people have been watching it free (NCAAs), and now they will have to pay to have a crappy company stream it at the same or lesser quality lol.

Wow, this thread shows how entitled this generation has become.

Interestin wrote:

It's funny for all the hate flotrack gets here all the athletes interact with them and milepslit all the time, and letsrun? Well not so much, just envy I suppose?

If you think putting every major meet behind a paywall with terrible coverage is good for the sport then that's on you.

My life is ruined

How shortsighted can an organization be? The way to make money in the long run is to promote the sport and grow the number of people who are interested in watching. Charging people to watch might make money this year, but it's a terrible long run strategy.

Look at what happened to boxing when they decided to make every big fight pay-per-view. I'm sure they made a ton of cash in the short run, but they ultimately killed the sport because the fan base went away. If a big money sport like boxing can be nearly killed by that business model, what makes the NCAA think that a niche sport like XC is going to turn a long term profit?

This a travesty. Screw them, they're not getting my money.

I posted this in the other thread too but its not entitlement as much as its people thinking it should be free cause it has been for years. Contrary to what some of the sentiment has been towards the free stream of the past I have always found it to be entertaining and well done with the exception of the years at Louisville or with high winds preventing the use of the towers.

The gripe that people continue to have with Flotrack is that they charge an excessive amount for a poor product. If I watched the stream this year I doubt that it will be any better and in all likelihood will actually be worse than the previous years product that was free of charge and allowed the masses to enjoy the culmination of the collegiate cross country season.

Do you not understand that everything costs something. Producing a live broadcast of a cross country meet is not easy or cheap. That cost has to be subsidized in some way, otherwise nobody would do it. So you either have to have a sponsor willing to cover the entire cost, watch ads throughout the broadcast (and given the low number of impressions this meet likely gets, its probably tough to recoup costs just through ads) or some sort of fee for viewing. When you watch (the extremely profitable) March Madness you would be watching ads and paying a subscription (for cable). Same goes for the Olympics.

They should make their money off advertisement like any other tv/streaming rights. They are either trying to double dip with pay-per-view and ads or they cant lock any ads down. Pay per view will kill this sport that already has few followers.