Hello Vital MTB Visitor,
We’re conducting a survey and would appreciate your input. Your answers will help Vital and the MTB industry better understand what riders like you want. Survey results will be used to recognize top brands. Make your voice heard!
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The Vital MTB Crew
First and foremost, I am not suggesting Red Bull starts charging for what they are currently producing!. (though they may, more on that below).
I've written a lot, but since we are all too ADD, here are the bullet points...
1) People pay to watch every minute of the TDF (and other classics), including the early bits of the flat stages.
2) People watch tens of hours of golf during a major or semi major. There are a lot of office monkeys out there with multiple monitors at their desk. Not a big deal to put a streaming feed up in a corner.
3) Considering there are only a handful of big races a year, I want as much coverage as I can get. Maybe I don't watch it all, maybe I do. People in moto get a lot more race coverage (video) than we do, plenty of an audience there.(or most any sport!~)
4) The beauty of 2019 is you don't need a syndicated channel to broadcast stuff. Streaming is the future, obviously, and so are packages like this.
5) Anyone saying "Red Bull has too much money" reminds me of that scene from Chappelle's Show when Rick James is grinding his feet into Eddie Murphies couch, gets his ass whooped, then crawls out of Eddie's house saying something I can't repeat.
6) Red Bull is a business. Frankly, I'm shocked we get the coverage we do. I wouldn't be surprised if that entire platform is turned into a Netflix type $X/month platform in the next few years. It can't be a big money maker for the company, and there has to be a fair amount of "brand equity" priced in, which I'd say is a tough sell in a sustainability kind of way. (if I'm the finance guy making that call, its a tough sell to management...)
7) If Red Bull was seeing more money from this thing, I'd bet a lot of money they could/would put more cameras on track, and it would be a better viewing experience. If they had enough reason to, you could be watching a raw feed, akin to what the control room sees, and toggle between what camera you want to see. Nothing holding that back! (except money). It'd be so rad to hear Rob via audio, see the produced feed, but then be able to see other riders on course live. It'd be amazing.
In the end I want to see racing fandom flourish. The more superfans we can get in the sport, the better. The more we can follow the sport, the better. The more a producer can directly see ROI from covering an event, the better.
I am over the "free advertising model". I want to pay for what I see, so things are more transparent and a content company can make better choices around whether something is worth it or not.
I could go on...but I'll stop there.
agreed that logistics of quali broadcast would be tough b/c of multiple riders on track. also agreed about how grumpy/unappreciative people feel about the current state of the webcast. i'm pretty surprised at the "bring back freecaster" comments. i bet if we dug into the ridemonkey archives, we could find pages and pages of complaints about freecaster cutting out or not working well back then. i loved freecaster at the time, but there sure seems to be some nostalgic memory loss going on about then vs now.
where are the dumbed-down tracks for cameras? i don't understand. because there was canberra, that meant the entire WC circuit is bad forever? or because at leogang trees were cut down 2 years ago that means the track is easy for cameras? sure ft bill has the motorway and leogang has some buffed out sections, but maribor was rad, val di sole is insane, mont sainte anne, lenzerheide, les gets, west virginia, andorra...what am i missing here besides "go back to schladming"? minnaar discusses modern tracks at the end of his interview with loic. modern bikes, modern riding, modern speeds and tv coverage.
i too find the "red bull has too much money" comments fascinating. why should red bull be expected to do more work for no increase in pay just because they've earned billions off their sugar water? what if your boss asks you to step up your game at work. you say, "i'm all for it. do i get a raise for the extra work?". the boss says, "no raise for you, just more work because you have plenty of money in your bank account compared to jimmy over there. jimmy will get paid the same as you but will do less work because he blew his money on poker in vegas and is not as financially stable as you." if red bull really only cared about their money, they'd dump the PIA loss-leader of broadcasting world cups and just throw all their effort into esports (which they'll prob do someday anyway) because mountain bikers would still buy their drink.
(btw, i love talking about this stuff and would give a pinky toe to see what the real dollar figures and view counts are)
We have to stop being cheap. This goes back to freecaster asking for 5 bucks for world champs. Our sport isn't huge enough to get a slot on cable for this.
Your two options for no are:
- No. I don't even watch the full free webcast now.
- No. I'm a cheap mountain biker and would try to watch a poached/stolen version
What about, "No, I don't think the current offering is worth paying for but I do watch it currently as it is free", or "No, there aren't enough races" or myraid other reasons for No.
For me it's no, but I'm not contributing to your poll because it doesn't represent my answer, namely that the current product isn't worth paying for (for a number of reasons). It's clearly an advertising vehicle too, so they would have to do some serious reworking for it to be a paid-for product.
For those wanting more cameras/to see more of the run, logistically very difficult as there are usually two (or more) riders on track at any one time, so to show every run start to finish (like, for example, downhill skiing) the tracks would have to be shorter or there would have to be far fewer riders (my preference) or the event would last much longer.
I'm not shocked at all that we get the current level of coverage. The infrastructure require is not particularly high, and technology is improving constantly. We've watched the olympics in a similar fashion for decades, yet we've only had this level of coverage in mtb for a few years.
It is an advertising model, provided for free as a vehicle for advertising material, and that's unlikely to change due to the size of the sport. Red Bull (and the myriad other sponsors which must not be forgotten about in terms of their contribution to the fact that coverage is happening - RB will have agreements with all advertisers in question, well actually they have an agreement with the event organisers who in turn have advertising agreements) get FAR more casual viewers exposed to advertising than they would if they introduced a paid model to people who are more likely to be consuming the products advertised already.
You're right, whether RB have "too much" money is subjective and irrelevant when discussing what they're likely to do. No company ever decided it had too much money and so didn't charge people. If they have a product they feel they CAN charge for successfully, they WILL.
Shawn (the OP) knows content and marketing pretty damn well. As in "he started a thing called litter which turned into Vital" well. I am defending him here because I think its prudent, and to show you that this ("adventure sports" advertising/content/#howyoumakemoneyinallofthis) is a bit more like the Wild West than you are making it out to be.
I know the model Red Bull is operating on, I also have some inkling of an idea what it costs for them to run a production like they are running. I'd bet dollars to donuts it is far more than most think, and that it is not even close to profitable.
...so you are saying "its an advertising vehicle". Fair. But a point has to come where you as a company go "how is this money direclty tied to ROI". The answer there is pretty damn hard to parse out, to the point where Red Bull dropping coverage of mountain biking would be 100% immaterial to their financial results.
Yeah, yeah, I'd like to see more races, full live POV of every run at EWS (actually, I don't want that...at all), bla bla bla, but what I suggested seems like the most logical step to proving race coverage to be worthwhile for a production company, give a free version away, make the die-hards pay for a premium version.
Unlike a lot of you, I remember a time when you couldn't watch this stuff on TV, the internet, your smartphone, your iPad...whatever. There'd be films like Alpha Project, and Rankin's stuff, that was it. In the early 2000s, when I came into the sport, everyone talked about this time in the 90s like some majestic time, when you could watch DH racing on NBC Wide World of Sports...and then poof, it was gone, for years until FreeCaster sort-of-kind-of covered things, then that was gone, now onto the Red Bull years.
The question beckons however, if this was SO obviously good for ad reasons, why has it folded so many times? Answer is "its not". Thankfully Red Bull can justify the spend, at least for now, but don't pretend like things are so good at Red Bull it couldn't happen again...
On a different note, there are ways to broadcast full runs, you are forgetting this isn't cable TV. You could fathom a platform where the user is seeing the "end result" (the produced show) and hearing the audio, but can pick whatever camera they want to watch. It'd be really cool, and it wouldn't take *too* much work to pull that off.
I realize golf is a totally different tier when it comes to the demographic, and one could say road cycling is too, but those scales have been tipping a different direction for a LONG time. Go ahead and look at golf's biggest website, compare the traffic to pinkbike. Yes, Golf wins, but its not by nearly as much as one would think. EDIT: I realize my comparison is a bit off, the number of people golfing dwarfs mountain biking, but the audience is still bigger than it was 10 years ago, and growing. If the Web.com tour gets viewership, so too can "extended mountain bike racing coverage".
In the end this is a bit of a chicken or an egg arguement. You need people to watch to grow the coverage side of the sport, but you need coverage for people to want to watch. There is a "bridge too far", and right now, I'm happy with the free coverage we get, I just want more coverage of the races we do ge to see.
...so yeah, I'd happily pay a premium fee to get a little more coverage and support the sport I love so much.
Edited for clarity, too much coffee makes for some pretty harebrained writing...
B. the poll says would you pay for MORE coverage, not would you pay for the existing coverage. (i would personally pay for the existing coverage. i'm amazed that it's free anymore. i also have no problem with the # of races as it is)
i agree that it seems like they could try to figure out an advertising play. the UCI is involved (probably complicates the crap out things), and there is Mercedes this year, so...
i also agree more camera angles is a toughy on a track like fort william (4:30 long) b/c of multiple riders on course. on all the 3-minute tracks, we do get most of the run as it's basically one rider on course.
(lol at brines defending me in the other response...pretty funny. ahhh alpha project.). redhook, if you haven't, check out rob warner's podcast we did a year or so ago - https://www.vitalmtb.com/features/The-Inside-Line-Podcast-Rob-Warner,22… - he discusses some of the production involved in a webcast that definitely surprised me. it's not just some cameras and a commentator. there is writing, rehearsal, graphics, fact-finding, pre-race compilations, not to mention the infrastructure to put it all together. maybe you know something about setting up a live tv broadcast that i don't, but a DH live stream does not seem easy, or insignificant regardless of existing technology. it may not be on the scale of a golf production, but hardly low-level when elements and covering a 1-2 mile course down a mountain is concerned.
(i'll say it again... great discussion. i love this stuff!)
RedBull has the rights on a whoping lot of (great to me) sports, they earn for sure a whole lot of money thanks to their exposure, if not I guess RedBull TV would not be free anymore from a long time. And/or it would not have that range of contents.
So... I'm okay with the current state. Not the best cameramen, nor the best coverage, BUT it's absolute bonkers at this price (just like their WRC coverage). And pay for more ? No thanks. I currently have the "more" for free on Vital.
MTB is just a part of that strategy. I have to think there will be some sort of monetization at some point here. Either Ads from other companies or a sale of the RedBull network to another player.
I know there are some legit gripes out there but we are in a pretty good era. Riders are getting paid better, the production and access is good for the price, and it does appear that RedBull is making investments to improve things. I don't think this will last forever as subs and ads will need to generate enough money for this to be viable long-term. Right now, it can operate at a loss due to the current market conditions having a high value on engagement.
2. So.....less action, more fluff?
3. I'm assuming you weren't around in the freecaster days. But there's more that happens during race runs than just one person wins. It's good to see the "bottom" of the field because it gives perspective on just how crazy fast the top people are. Plus think about what you're saying.....you want LESS bike riding coverage? Start later in the stream then
4. Heh....supercross and outdoor motocross. Plus UCI DH coverage before redbull embriefened it.
5. Stuff happens. Sometimes in Qualifying.
6. Agreed. keep it up VITAL!
7. Hell yes. Logistics are tough. But it's not like this sport wasn't covered by TV cameras 20 years ago. It can certainly be done.
Your #3. seems to dismiss showing the bottom of the field because the faster guys end up rising to the top, and that the "only benefit" of a longer broadcast would she showing those bottom guys. Yes. That's a good benefit. They should do that again. Because it was awesome when they did. And hopefully that will include the entire field that has you in it soon. I'm not trying to qualify for one of these things and even I want to see the whole field again. That's not a minor addition.
Your English is no doubt better than my Greek or Turkish but that's what you sounded like you were saying.
Well put. All of it.
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