Bummer, peacock was a lot cheaper than Flotrack. And you got a lot of other good stuff on Peacock, not much else good on Flotrack.
My concern with Flotrack is the quality of their announcers and the quality of their stream. If they mess up the DL meets they deserve whatever criticism comes their way. But, if you want to watch a lot of fast races, now you get the Sound Running meets, Stanford meets, Penn Relays, Bryan Clay, BU meets, and DL meets in one package, along with some of the other internationals meets. I probably missed a few too. Many come with many slower heats, but a viewer can sift thru them. Maybe with this they actually hire good announcers/commentators.
We can only hope. I won't tolerate their usual coverage: shot at ground level on an iPhone or from a guy that can't properly fly a drone, bad announcing that makes "Boom goes the dynamite!" kid sound like prime Bob Costas, and their trademark glitch/lag/blackout streams.
Every time I've watched any of their coverage I've been astonished at how amateurish it is. iPhone at ground level is about right.
But maybe they're picking up and restreaming feed from, you know, professional camerapersons and directors?
Flotrack will be restreaming the world feed. No idea about commentators though. I’ll be surprised if they even have boots on the ground for a lot of these meets.
Flotrack 100% knows they’ll lose money on this deal initially, which is why they won’t invest any additional resources into the production if they don’t need to.
Let’s just be super conservative and say Flotrack paid $500k for this deal. Diamond League runs for 6 months, so anyone interested would purchase the year package for $150. We’re looking at 3,333 new subscribers before they break even (and that’s once again assuming everyone is buying a full year package).
The more likely scenario is that people treat it more as a PPV event. Jakob is going for a WR in Oslo and the field is stacked, sure someone will pay $30 one time to watch that race. In this case Flotrack is looking at 16k+ new subscribers before this generates revenue.
Now add in the additional operating expenses, airfare/lodging to travel to these meets, etc, and I don’t see a way where this makes money for Flotrack in the short term.
Clearly horrible news. Does this mean the camera work will be handled by Flotrack too? If so, this is extra devastating and I'll definitely not be tuning in. If not, then we will survive with VPN.
This is going to sound super naive so forgive me, but doesn't the NBA do quite a bit of subsidizing of the WNBA?
I know the NFL is king and wants no competition, but it seems that it would stroke their ego to help carry the load of tracks revenue. They could have some diamond league action prior to NFL games in the fall, even internationally. I know football fans don't care about the distance events, but it seems like they would want to do more crossover/promotional stuff like when DK Metcalf or Tyreek Hill jump in a 100m.
But at the end of the day, the FOX/CBS/ESPN pregame broadcasts on Sundays bring in way more views than track events
Here’s a good bit of context I found regarding viewership in the USA:
“Coverage of track & field’s Prefontaine Classic, which this year doubled as the final of the Diamond League, averaged a 0.47 rating and 744,000 viewers on NBC last Saturday and a 0.49 and 765,000 on Sunday — down from last year, when the network’s lone window averaged a 0.6 and 977,000 over Memorial Day weekend. Two years ago, when the event took place weeks after the Olympic Games, NBC’s coverage topped the million viewer mark.”
And this is for a meet that was broadcast on NBC, not Peacock. Honestly it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the early season DL meets on Peacock didn’t even break 6 figures of viewership.
Does anyone know how many subscribers Flotrack actually has? Pretty easy to see website traffic and video minutes watched, but that doesn’t provide inside into actual sub numbers.
I have peacock subscription. One of the main reasons was to watch sports, including track + field coverage and marathon coverage. I watched the diamond league meets previously usually fast forwarding through much of them to watch key moments. Now I will just wait and see if some of the content makes its way to Youtube or something. Otherwise no great loss. Track + field is not really all that exciting to watch in the first place. FloTrack and other providers of coverage have a twisted idea of how to grow viewership. Now the sport will have even less followers.
I have been very anti-Flotrack in the past, to the point of rooting for their collapse, but after watching NBC and ESPN put commercials on everything I am changing my tune. Running has been tried on national TV networks and it hasn't done well because of the way they treat each race. Cutting away to commercials during the Olympic Marathon Trials was the last straw for me.
The other part of it is I work with cyclist and they have no problem with UCI partnering with FloBikes for the next 4 years. They see $150 a year as cheap. What is it about runners that don't want to pay money for anything? Our sport is way behind because the small amount of runners who watch it want to treat it like the NBA and NFL. We should follow cycling's lead on this, have you ever watched a cycling broadcast? There are no commercials and very insightful commentators that get you excited about the race. They seem to have it figured out.
If the result of going to Flotrack is no more commercials, commentators who don't talk like no one has ever watched a race before, showing the runners who finish after the first place finisher, then I think this is actually a good thing.
You are going to be yearning for commercials and Ato Bolden when you are stuck looking at "TECHNICAL ERRORS...BE BACK SOON".
I fully agree that this is a bad decision and not in the interest of the sport at all. But some posters on here complaining about Flotrack being a money sucker are incredibly unfair and disregard how data-driven platforms work. Flotrack has a much smaller fan base, like basically 0 compared to NBC or Netflix. The product they sell is a datastream > essentially zero cost of copying / reproducing. So only fixed costs of staff/software etc. matter and those are spread over a muuuuuch smaller population > higher price per person needed.
So yeah, Flotrack should not have gotten the deal because they have no meaningful network effects to offer it to the individual customer for cheap and exposure is even worse. But you can't blame them for trying to break even, they're on the wrong side of a digital business model.
"The product they sell is a datastream > essentially zero cost of copying / reproducing."
Yeah and that's the problem. What made Flotrack great back in the day was that they actually produced real/engaging content for running enthusiasts. And because that content was so good, it was worth paying for. And if you still didn't want to pay, no worries they had tons of awesome free content as well.
Then Flotrack realized why bother with content creation when you can simply prop up an iPhone and livestream every meet on the planet, and dozens of parents won't think twice about paying $30 to watch little Jenny run heat 6 of her 800m race.
But you're right, they stream SOOOO much data from SOOOO many different meets/locations that the premium price point is needed.
Moving from peacock/NBC starting in 2025. Major L for the sport
They are killing the sport. They will get some of the diehards but they won't get me. $6 a month is reasonable $30 is not to me. I will just watch it for free on YouTube the next day. They are doing nothing to grow the sport. Flotrack is almost creating a monopoly by forcing you to be a flotrack subscriber. I don't see this as a plus whatsoever for track
With regard to TFRRS and Milesplit acquisitions, I just want to say that #1 it takes a lot to build and compile accurate information over a given season but #2 99.9% of that information's value has a severe time limit. It is, in essence, more costly to gather and store than what it is worth to the running sports world.
However, one thing past youth sports results is useful for that the lay person does not see is as secondary sources for genealogical records. To my point, the real value of these comprehensive datasets might not be immediately discernable through our running sports lenses.
Fwiw, I am exactly the track fan who is paying $5/month for Peacock to watch DL and other meets, plus the rest of Peacock's vast sports and non-sports content.
Hopefully a lot of people will cancel their Peacock memberships and refuse to pay Flotrack. The least popular sports should not be the most expensive to watch. But you could easily pay $60/month between flotrack and a half dozen other subscription services that offer track programing at various levels. That will be the case as long as terrible T&F leadership and fanatics like us continue to support predatory/exclusive business models like flotrack and runnerspace.
But you could easily pay $60/month between flotrack and a half dozen other subscription services that offer track programing at various levels.
Which is exactly why I think this could be the start of a bigger play by Flotrack. All things considered the T&F/Running market is pretty small (at least here in the US), but like you mentioned everything is super scattered in terms of content and accessibility. It would not surprise me if Flotrack went on an acquisition/partnership rampage in an attempt to corner the market and get rights to every possible track broadcast in the US (minus the obvious NBC broadcasts).
If Flotrack can afford (and win) a Diamond League bid, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to afford tons of other streaming rights.
How long is this for? NBC will cover the Olympics.... I guess nothing should surprise me with T&F. Older meets will still get posted so the good news will be we can still watch many races. But not live.
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