Flotrack signs multi-year deal to stream diamond league

NordVPN is $5 a month and you can get the World Feed on Youtube with good British commentators. Anyone paying $30 a month for FloTrack is a sucker. Don't give a dime to these clowns and they won't bid for the rights again the following year.

Im perfectly willing to pay for T&F, but charging 2x what Netflix costs to watch maybe 1-2 races a month for half the year is insanity. T&F is so unbelievably short sighted in their thinking, trying to squeeze every last $ from a tiny customer base and shrinking it even further in the process

This is a major L for the sport. Anyone have any idea how much they pay WA for this? Rather than pay the gold medallists $50k each, how about subsidizing the broadcasts so you don't have to be rich to watch track and field in America?

WA should have PAID apple or someone to do it as long as they promoted it. Instead, they are now going behind a paywall. At a minimum, they should have just offered it themselves for payment.

umm I won’t watch live … maybe the rerun on YouTube if available… track is dead.

Awful, awful news. FloTrack must have less than 1% the number of subscribers that Peacock has (lots of people get Peacock for free via their internet provider). The price of watching diamond league is going up 6x, insanity

So by how much do we think the viewer numbers will drop in the US? Do we have data for how many people watched it the past few years?

Flotrack is a terrible product and unless you want to watch a lot of track, it is not worth it. Are you going to watch $150 worth of running in a year - if you have a job and actually run yourself, you probably are not going to. That is 20-30 events worth to me. A VPN is probably cheaper and unless a lot of what you want to watch is us collegiate meets, a better use of your money.

The monthly cost might be worth it for 2-3 months if you are going to watch all of the diamond league and some more during that time. However, a VPN is much cheaper and you can select coverage from more professional commentators in another nation.

Flotrack twitter post announcing it has comments turned off. Cowards!

Quit complaining. FloTrack is $150 per year, which is $12.50 per month. Hardly 2x Netflix. And this is the USA, which has the richest poor people in the world. If you can't afford to spend $150 on your hobby in the USA, that's sad.

And next week everyone will be complaining how Track and Field athletes earn far less that athletes in other big sports. Ever wonder why that is?

Compare this to NASCAR where fans pick a favorite driver and literally buy products exclusively from every company listed on the side of the car.

I'm no Flotrack fan, their coverage has been terrible, but why are the people in our sport so cheap about everything? It's why we can't have nice things. $30 a month is nothing. People here will spend $30 on 1 meal but then act like it's insane to spend that kind of money on running.

If you want the sport to grow then help it grow or stop complaining.

Exactly. For a sport that most people don't follow, this could kill it in the end potentially.

Yes but the potential for growth is much greater on a platform that hosts content besides just track and field. No one will happen upon the Diamond League without purposefully seeking it out (and being willing to pay $30/month exclusively for athletics content). The 6x price increase won't discourage the 1% of fans, but it surely isn't bringing in any new ones.

Are you freaking kidding me?? $30 a month to watch like 15 minutes of running is insanity, no other sport would put up with this garbage. I pay the NBA $12 a month to watch EVERY single game not in my home market.

And this isn't an all-encompassing T&F subscription we are talking about here, there are still plenty of meets and championships you need other subscriptions for. Acting like fans not wanting to get price gouged for a garbage subscription are the reason this sport isn't growing is pathetic.

Bad news for Kara goucher and the nbc announcers too

Flotrack sucks. Always has and always will. Horrible quality video, bad commentary, and outrageous pricing. What a disappointment

Why would we compare to Nascar? Runners are barely sponsored as it is by brands and I'm sure they are being paid less than what we think.

There are also maybe 2 meets/races a month worth tuning in for, whereas Nascar is just about every other week

Wow. What a horrible decision by World Athletics (or whoever made this choice) to give Flotrack (a niche streaming platform) the rights instead of a major, well known and used platform like NBC/Peacock. I am completely astonished by this BS.

So let's see if I have this right. Track & field, which is not nearly as popular as NFL Football or English Premier League Soccer, will charge a lot of money to watch the best meets whereas the other leagues offer the best matches and games for free.

How does the law of supply & demand work again?

Yeah, my VPN will be getting some work!

NBC basically said "we don't care about the diamond league outside of the Prefontaine Classic." Now instead of $5.99, we all have to fork over $29.99 a month. Is it any wonder this sport has a terrible time attracting audiences? You think the average viewer is going to fork over $30 a month to watch track? F**k no. The sport is now officially relegated to the hardcore viewer.

Who still works for Flotrack? I've never been a Gordon Mack fan but the track all-access videos that he has started producing have been solid