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

T. Payne wrote:

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.

Promote the event and then you'll make money on ads. Promote the sport as a long term strategy and you'll make a lot of money in years to come.

More kids participate in track and XC than any other high school sport. The fact that almost none of these people will become fans of the sport at the collegiate and professional level is a testament to the bind boggling ineptitude of the NCAA and USATF.

This is so ridiculous. FloTrack claims that there is a seven-day free trial available:

https://twitter.com/FloTrack/status/798903819837075456

"@chrisbuechner Hey Chris, there is a 7-day free trial offer available so everyone can watch the NCAA XC Championships. Hope you can make it!"

But when I go to the meet page (

https://www.flotrack.org/live/1922-di-ncaa-xc-championships/pay?next=http://live.flotrack.org/#/event/1922-di-ncaa-xc-championships#/event/1922-di-ncaa-xc-championships

), I see no mention of a free trial, only options to buy the full plan.

So I emailed FloTrack support about this and got this response:

"""

Hello,

We do not offer free trials on a regular basis. We only offer them on a

random selection, your best option is to continually check the website

to see if we are offering any. Let us know if you have anymore questions.

"""

What a joke. I really hope we'll be able to watch this for free, but things aren't looking good right now especially so close to the champs.

So much for consistency...

This.

I posted what I'm pasting below on another thread in regards to the free Trial. It's relevant to the free trials so I'm posting it here.

Your post also reminds me of a second thing I don't like about the way they do their subsciption model. I clicked through that link and they don't show you how much it costs on the initial registration page. What happened to transparency?

Also it used to be they didn't have a link to cancel once you signed up (you had to email or call them. I'm pretty sure from posts on here that is changed now and you can cancel with a click). I'd really like it a) you could one off watch and event b) they told you what a subscription cost upfront. Instead I feel like I'm getting trying to get tricked into signing up for one of those monthly subscriptions you don' t really want but forget to cancel.

Here's what was on the other thread and my response.

I assume they let you preview the site for free for 7 days (when you give them a credit card) and on day 8 they charge for the subscription. Just don't forget to cancel!

I don't subscribe to Flotrack. One beef I have with it or Runnerspace or USATF.tv for that matter is there is no way to pay to watch a one off event. I don't want to have to take the additional step of having to cancel my subscription. Neither one is a network in the traditional sense with constant programming that I want to subscribe too. They have 1 -5 events a year I might want to watch. So you watch this now and until the spring nothing. Or I subscribe to USATF.TV and all winter have nothing.

Two people have written to me laughing at this statement, "This is a move in the right direction as we continue to look for ways to bring our championships to a broader audience and ways to improve the overall student-athlete experience."

Just be honest. This is a business deal to make some $ on a niche sport. LetsRun.com's audience is more than double Flotracks (not counting milesplit).

1) Charging for something that used to be free does not expand the audience. The meet used to be on TV. Then it went free on the internet. If I remember correctly when there were view counts it got around 10,000 unique streamers at once. That's when it was free. Does anyone remember seeing those numbers?

2) Making people cancel a subscription after the event does not improve the overall student-athlete "experience".

Turner has to broadcast the championships per its NCAA agreement I assume. They think of it as a total money loser. Flotrack needs to increase its user base and has investors so they paid Turner.

For niche sports, one might wonder why the NCAA doesn't just charge people to watch online. It costs money to put on the broadcast and advertising isn't paying the bills. If the NCAA.com directly just started charging people to pay per view NCAA championships of non-revenue sports they might get some PR flak. This is a round about way to do that without directly receiving the heat.

If they were honest they would say, the dollars we receive from this go to helping student-athletes. The whole NCAA model lets basketball and football float all the other sports and here Turner is able to gets some dollars to stop the bleeding.

Curious as to how this is possible.....

Here it is from their website...

As a special offer for this year's event, seven-day free trials are available for monthly and annual FloPRO subscriptions.

Makes it sound like we can all watch it for free. hmmm

Sponsorship or pay per view or combination. Not a forced subscription per the flotrack model.

This page references the free trial...

https://www.flotrack.org/live/1922-di-ncaa-xc-championships/signup?next=http://live.flotrack.org/#/event/1922-di-ncaa-xc-championships

It does but it Doesnt.....

If you subscribe to them, arent you already paying??????? And then they give you the free 7 days? There is most surely a catch.

TN_Coach wrote:

It does but it Doesnt.....

If you subscribe to them, arent you already paying??????? And then they give you the free 7 days? There is most surely a catch.

Of course there is a catch! It's not like they learned common sense anytime recently...

Update on my situation:

I told the FloSports rep about the tweet and mention on the website of the free seven-day trial in relation to this event again, and I got another response from their support saying:

"""

Hello,

If that is so, then when you create an account, you would have the

option to sign up for the free trail. Unfortunately, you can not use

your current account to sign up for the free trial.

"""

Seeing this I went ahead and created a new account on the NCAA XC event page and put my CC info in expecting to get the free trial. Except it never happened, I just got the message "You selected the Monthly plan. $19.99 has been charged to your credit card."

So in sum, DO NOT sign up for FloTrack expecting a free trial for this event -- I am currently asking for a refund and I hope it'll be granted. If they planned on doing free trials for this event they clearly haven't opened it up yet.

rojo wrote:

I wish the NCAA would just say, "We wanted the money." Don't lie and BS us.

What is the likelihood that this is a subtle tactic of NCAA wanting to find reasons to drop TF/XC coverage. "People aren't paying to watch it, so why even bother since it shows no one is interested in viewing it? We're losing money on these sports, so let's drop it and focus on football and basketball instead"

Sorry to hear that.

The Flotrack twitter guy keeps saying that the free trials are available.

i said it wrote:

Saw on twitter that they are giving a 7 day free trial of FLOPRO so all can watch.

How come when I just tried to sign up? It didn't give me that option.

It would be better if they a) let you pay for one off event

or b) let you sign up for the subscription without giving a credit card.

yep- he just told me "Yes, by signing up for FloPRO-- you are agreeing to the 7-day free trial which starts right away."

They claim the image in the status shows the prices AFTER the free trial. They want to hook you in in case you forget to cancel.

I hope the cost of buying the rights to this year's championship greatly outweighs the amount of revenue they bring in from new subscribers for it. I will not pay for this. Hopefully they learn a lesson.

They currently have a bit of a monopoly on live (and to an extent, taped) collegiate track & field coverage. Someone needs to put the effort in to build a competent rival with equal/better production value and analysis. Which would take time and money. I would be okay for paying for it if the production value and commentary (jesus christ...the commentary) were better, especially considering extras like WOW and the other content offered.

I have said it before, but I will lend my amateur broadcasting services so long as I have a way to get to the meet. I've been told I have a good "newsman" voice.

C/M Runner wrote:

https://twitter.com/FloTrack/status/798940550007296000

They claim the image in the status shows the prices AFTER the free trial. They want to hook you in in case you forget to cancel.

Thanks for your tweets. I don't know where they are getting that pic from. The official NCAA XC Champs meet page has no mention of free trials for me (I archived it in case they change it):

The FloSports rep (via

, their recommended support email) misled me into thinking that if I signed up I would just be given the trial, but I was charged. Now it looks like the page is just giving a 500 Internal Server Error. Great.