Flotrack signs multi-year deal to stream diamond league

So serious question. I was at a restaurant the other day and ESPN or ESPN2 had the knife throwing championships on. Knife throwing. WTF is track doing when they let that sport get more exposure?

Fire up your VPNs boys and girls.

I can't roll my eyes enough at this. Not remotely close to being a monopoly.

I mean....Obviously this sucks for the publicity for the sport but you can literally just set a vpn to Ireland and watch all the diamond league meets easily on youtube.

This isn’t that bad. People with solar panels still pay utility companies for the power lines on their property through their mortgage, that’s more of a rip off. The yearly subscription is about 1% of a paycheck for me.

I’m excited to watch flotrack and some diamond league!!

If you complain, get your money up buddy. We live in a free market, you can make thousands selling crap like socks!

"I don't know what Flotrack's paying them, but it can't be enough to make up for the long-term damage of reduced visibility."

Congress could mandate the Diamond League be shown at prime time on every major network and the sport would be lucky to notch a 5% increase in permanent viewership.

Visibility is not the problem.

American's complaining about FloTrack have no idea how hard it was to watch T&F pre-internet. It was almost never broadcast in the US and when it was, it was massively edited and chopped. It was horrible.

"if you want to grow the sport it has to be on a platform widely accessible to the public."

Make the sport amazing to watch and understand and the broadcasters will be screaming 'take my money'.

A lot of things were harder pre-internet.

FloTrack's self-produced coverage nails the chopped and horrible parts of pre-internet track coverage. I'm certain they'll figure a way to screw up a packaged professional feed.

FloTrack is infinitely better than no coverage.

But ask yourself - if T&F is so great, why did FloTrack win the bid for the Diamond League? NBC and everyone else could have easily outbid them.

Ya'll drop more than 29.99$ at starbucks like every 3 days lol ya'll spoiled with how cheap netflix and some other services are. acting like you gonna be living paycheck to paycheck by subscribing to flotrack or something lmao

How do we ban THOUGHTSLEADER? If we get a 90% vote in favor of it, is he banned? Or can Flotrack get him an entry level role and require he not visit LRC?

Everything used to be on Watch Athletics, You could just click on the Link and Watch Major Marathons and ALL The big Track Meets for Free, Then FLOTRACK bought the rights to Big Marathons like London, Rotterdam etc and it was no longer free, now Track Falls, NOT GOOD. Yeah You can get VPN but that is not free, YET Football shows the Super Bowl AND NCAA Playoffs For Free, Baseball's World Series is Free, NBA Playoffs and Finals are Free, Kentucky Derby is Free, All the Big Nascar races are free ETC, But Running/Track and Field and Boxing The Sports I like are all for Pay without Showtime and HBO for Boxing, Espn does show some fights free, but big fights are all PPV, I do get to watch NCAA Wrestling and Olympic Wrestling Free, but there is not much Amateur Wrestling/Folk Style, Free Style and Greco on TV, except fot NCAA and the Olympics every 4 Years, I picked the wrong sports to be interested in.

The financials of this deal make no sense.

Flotrack definitely spent some decent cash to get broadcasting rights. Flosports is worth around $80mil, and Flotrack is currently valued at around $18mil. According to crunchbase, Flotrack does less than $3mil of revenue a year. Flotrack is 100% losing money on this deal for the foreseeable future.

I have a hunch this is the start of a much larger play. I would not be surprised if Flotrack attempted to acquire additional broadcasting rights for other track events. Flotrack wants to become the streaming hub for all Track/XC events in the USA. That’s the only way this deal makes any sense.

I don’t know. But I’m not sure World Athletics revenue would include DL. I’m assuming the DL meets get the revenue from their tv deal but could be wrong .

If it was a couple hundred grand a year maybe we should have bid. But if it’s that low why even do it?

and if Flotrack is taking a world feed and just charging you to watch it why not just do that yourself? I don’t see any value add from flotrack here.

Yeah that is available but it's not remotely comparable to Peacock. I watch almost nothing live. With Peacock that wasn't a concern at all. All I had to do was find the Diamond League broadcast in their replay section. Now I've got to be sitting in front of a screen like a dunce at a random and not always convenient time.

Your suggestion of Ireland is good, BTW. I've got another country that never fails but I'll keep that to myself. A few times I've mentioned workarounds online and next thing you know it's cut off.

Flotrack has been buying up meet and organizational broadcasting rights for quite some time now.

For example, NCAA XC / TF and major marathons were scooped up 7 years ago already.

Everything appears to be growing until they are shunned from the Olympics and the typical investor scratches their head wondering why. Buying up all these rights is daring and almost stupid. But it's all they can do to build up the portfolio.

It’s pure marketing from Flosports. They haven’t raised money in 5 years and considering their reported revenue, employee count, and overall operating expenses, I guarantee they’re in desperate need of additional funding.

“and if Flotrack is taking a world feed and just charging you to watch it why not just do that yourself? I don’t see any value add from flotrack here.”

Thats exactly the point. Flotrack doesn’t care about the product or quality of service. The benefit here is being able to include these broadcasting rights when speaking to investors. Same reason why they acquired TFRRS. It’s adding value to the Flosports portfolio. They paid a small fee to acquire the rights. They’ll invest little money into the actual broadcast. But they’ll have a dedicated slide on their fundraising pitch deck about the “potential” of this opportunity. Low risk high reward.

I guarantee we’ll hear about a series D funding round within the next 12 months. Ive been involved in enough startups to see the writing on the wall.