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The Vital MTB Crew
I don't think people are hating on the coverage because it's trendy to do so. They (myself included) are hating on it because it's an objectively worse experience as a fan compared to the RB days. The commentary from Ric and Cedric is largely asinine. I realize there's a lot of time to fill, but was Ric paid per mention of the race venue? How many times did Cedric say, "he's not stopping the bike!" when someone was going well. Uh, okay, well it is a DH race, stopping the bike is antithetical to winning. Aaron Gwin was the only saving grace on the commentary front and yet he was continually interrupted by the other two. The camera operators were objectively worse, bad angles and weird zooming made it difficult to see what was going on. Utterly useless, nausea inducing drone footage. Riders' times shown in green even when behind.
Growing pains are to be expected, but making the same mistakes rider after rider and round after round is inexcusable. WB/Disco should damn well have the resources to present a professional, polished product. Especially when you're asking people to pay for it when they're used to getting it for free.
I coughed up the money for a GCN+ subscription this year, but I will not be getting Max plus the BR sports add on for 2024 in the hopes that they get their shit together. In my mind 2023 was the year to prove that they were putting out a product worth paying for.
You are right that elite DH racing is an incredible sport, but as a diehard fan, I was let down and will vote with my dollars next year.
Crankworx must be loving this. Personally I think that any teams/riders that are on the fringe of qualifying should be considering doing more CX events. Comparing the YT numbers but given it’s finals vs semi finals the Crankworx views are quite a bit higher. If they were to add 2 more races they are only 1 behind World Cups. More global races, free on Red Bull tv with Rob and Elliot and bigger prize money. Isn’t that what everyone has been wanting?
Considering there were no semis and juniors weren't shown, looking at Discovery's YT numbers compared to RB's isn't comparing apples to apples. Personally I rarely looked at YT for any coverage in the RB days, I just used their player.
Yes and we’ll never know the true numbers between RB and Disco so comparing YT view is the closesr we’ll get and why I prefaced that it was finals vs semis.
Yes sorry, I should've quoted Mr. Nally when he was talking about viewing figures rather than you.
didn't watch one race.
in hopes of collecting some insight, i made an instagram story poll about watching live racing - i put it on insta b/c there are more people there and a more diverse group of viewers than in here. not sure we'll get much out of it, but why not? (there were # of character limitations, so i did what i could)
https://www.instagram.com/stories/vitalmtb/3258568864509497387/
With RBTV we only saw about ten women and 35 men or so. With 35-20 only on screen for a few minutes.
With Finn's winning MSA run in 22 we got 2mins 45sec of footage live. With Jackson's run this season we saw almost every second of it.
So seen as RBtv was 35+10 and less minutes of coverage.. I can't see why you'd not tune in in 24 for similar numbers and more minutes of footage?
sorry, didn't mean to imply that the broadcast should have more 30. IMO, 30 riders in a live raceday webcast is plenty. i was meaning if UCI/disco decided that only 30 men/10 women qualify for finals, then i wouldn't subscribe. if the finals field is that limited, i'd imagine the # of riders trying to qualify will significantly fewer, and personally, i find that makes the weekend less exciting b/c there are fewer stories to tell. all speculation though.
Agreed
In ‘22 I watched races live if they didn’t require we to wake up at 2am, and I watched the taped replays of every race usually same day, or the day after. In ‘23 I watched every Vital Raw, and maybe one or two of the winning run replays within a week of them happening, I’d have live timing up here and there too. Barring someone pirate streaming or pirating the entire broadcast to watch as soon as it ends, I will likely watch absolutely zero of this season if it is all behind a paywall. Why? Like others have said, the money isn’t going to the riders. WB is somehow hoping that by putting racing behind a paywall, it will grow the sport, attract outside sponsors, and by doing that will afford riders a larger salary which maybe will happen in corporate boardroom world, but not in the real one. DH racing will eventually be shown 3 years out of date on an obscure sports channel on Pluto TV at 11pm on a Tuesday.
Seems DH fans are expecting a lot out of a niche sport.
There's not that many sports where the athletes make direct money from TV revenue.
Sadly, for now, the only way we can help riders "make more money" from being on TV is by tuning in.
It's a salary sport, and good salaries for top riders. It's not a prize money sport (luckily for the riders) and not a TV revenue sport, cos the previous TV provider probably didn't make huge money from their free streaming model.
So expecting riders and teams to get.money from TV revenue in year 1 is surely a bit of wishful thinking. And adding to that, if WDBsports came out and said 15% of TV revenue was going into team prize money (like F1) BUT that meant 10 teams only... The fans would implode.
So basically it's the fans who want DH to stay all nice and cuddly, keep 300 entries and while somehow a series organiser pays out millions of $ in prize money?
Gonna be interesting to see where this goes in a few seasons..cos it's pretty clear that for some, DH was the entertainment of choice for people because it was free not cos it was good?
"it's pretty clear that for some, DH was the entertainment of choice for people because it was free not cos it was good?"
But it WAS good! AND it was free. And now its not as good, and it is also not free. It is as simple as that. Are you at all surprised people are annoyed?
The GCN app and GCN+ streaming service were the dedicated app/service for watching bike racing.
From the GCN closure announcement video it sounds like they were doing fine, and performing above WBD's expectations, but this is part of a much bigger push by WBD to consolidate their streaming services to save money/boost subscriptions.
A quick reminder that WBD are something like $50bn in debt after their merger, and were losing over $1bn a quarter at points in 2023.
The ease (or lack thereof) of people being able to watch bike racing wasn't any part of this decision.
Fair counterpoint. The package deal may bring in a more diverse audience whoch leads to better WB numbers which boosts athlete sponsorship capabilities. I like your optimistic perspective, although with the raising of registration and team fees, venue costs, closure of GCN, and format changes, and no changes to the purse, an optimistic perspective is hard for me to have. The constellation of changes that have unfolded make me skeptical that WB has the sports best interest at heart. I hope that they have a vision we don’t have this pans out in the long run. Keeping my hopes high, expectations low.
Any news about the USAC National Downhill Series? I bought a DH bike and am trying to go racing and wouldn’t mind an excuse to fly east if it was part of a national series.
No not surprised at all..humans are like that.. especially in countries like here in US where we have thousands of sport entertainment options on social media, streaming etc.
The idea that the racing wasn't "as good" in 2023 compared to 22 is nonsense though. The racing was better by all accounts. And from VDS onwards the coverage was good enough to be worth the money I paid for GCN. Wasn't as good as RB but it's year one.
I'm willing to give them a few seasons to sort it out. Some aren't. That's how it is. The top one racers will be the only ones to suffer from that.
Just seems to me that the most vocal people on forums who say the coverage is terrible are also the ones who say they haven't paid to watch 😂😂
Gotta be optimistic. It's only racing bikes. It's not that important.
I can't see an issue with increasing fees for the big teams. As long as that money finds its way into improvements for the series.
UCI made a loss running the world cups for years. So something has gotta change I suppose.
I agree
Last year’s series plus Big Bear sometime is the scuttlebut in the shuttle line. It would be great if they actually kept points for juniors and Cat 2/3’s this year, imo!
My issue with the sale of the promotion of the series is who they sold it to and the horrible foresight.
Literally a google search would have told UCI that Warner Bros/Discovery has tanked every single sport they've chosen to purchase broadcast rights to.
It should have been two separate products. One would be the organization/manpower/staffing/promotion company. The second being the broadcast company.
NFL controls the product & players. They sell various broadcast rights to NBC, ABC, FOX, Amazon, ESPN. Breeds competition for the broadcast of events. The venues maintain ticket sales & a percent of the revenue of the event.
My turn to chime in......
While I agree with almost most of you, not all, but most. Plain and simple. Money. Money is the root of all evil.
I did pay for GCN last year because I've never missed a race in almost 20 years. I do wake up at 2am, 3 am, 4am because nothing beats live coverage. Highlights are cool and all. But nothing beats live coverage.
Do I think 2023 coverage was up to par. Sure. Absolutely. Drones were troubling at times. To the one commenting on Rob and what not. Yes. Ric and Cedric need some training. Gwin was absolutely the best thing to come to the booth.
But was the racing this year out of control. yes. In a good way! all different winners except for one 2 peat.
My point. Us die hard fans are indeed potentially jaded and butt heart about this news. Do we expect or deserve anything. Probably not. Do we love our sport, yes!. Change is difficult at times. Will I pay for 2024? I'm not sure. I want to see if the suits above listen.
And back to my first point. The MLB just signed a baseball player for $700 Million. Seven hundred MILLION! He's not the greatest player ever. You know what the greatest mountain biker IN THE WORLD makes for winning a race. Less than $3k dollars.
So yea, supporting a media/streaming/sports production does hurt. These men and women are risking/breaking off their bodies for pennies. While some, lets be honest, outfielder/pitcher makes more than the entire top 30 combined? And that's shits free!
Hate if you want. bottom line. Our people do not get paid enough. We pay $12K dollars for a new DH bike. They don't even make a 3rd of that for being the best in the world.
The original sale was with ESO doing the organization and WDB doing some logistics and broadcasting. That quickly changed with ESO merging with WBDsports. What parties and who at the UCI knew that in advance we'll never know.
But I agree. It's concerning. WDBsports will drop the whole series mid contract if they want or feel the need.
The best in the world that you describe are currently paid for the sole purpose of selling you that $12k DH bike whereas an MLB player's salary from their team is purely performance/entertainment based - although they might have separate endorsement deals to sell a brand of glove or bat. That's the main difference. I think something like gambling (i.e. horse racing) would bring much more money into DH racing than any broadcasting strategy every could, but there is a lot of ethical and legal grey areas with that.
Ohtanis contract makes sense for the Dodgers, he will bring in $1B+ revenue for the team over the course easily. He is literally Jesus in Japan.
The idea to make $2m a year for 10 years then $68m for the next 10 is downright genius by all involved.
Good luck to him, hope he can keep that elbow healthy.
I'll probably be the only one to up vote your comment. Cos haters just wanna hate 😂
For the record, I have Max and will pay for the addon to watch MTB racing.
I still think it is another move that will limit the viewership and hurt MTB racing overall. It does not grow the sport or make it attractive to sponsors.
Wow. Thank you for sharing that vid. I take full apologies not knowing his history. That was a great video that was educated to my response.
And by the way.... "jesus of japan" had me rolling.
oddly enough, i just received a text from AT&T saying "don't forget that Max is already included with your wireless plan at no additional cost, download the Max app etc..."
I had no idea. So for me, it should be similar to what I paid for GCN last year. I'll take it.
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