TNT Sports to put cycling behind £30.99-a-month paywall, as Eurosport coverage to end and future of free-to-air Tour de France remains unclear

Getting sense of Deja vu here. Goodbye Cycling, I fear in my life it's going the way of US Pro Football. 
Back in the 80's I became a massive "Redskins" fan off the back of Channel 4 coverage but it gradually tailed off after all its moves and changes. I now look back on that as a bit of a golden age but can't bothered with the current state of the game. I see my obsession with Cycling and the Tour (which started about the same time, again thanks Channel 4) going down the same path. 

Having mulled this over for a bit, my thoughts are that this is unlikely to be about simply rinsing cycling fans for more cash, it will be about realising cost savings (to generate greater profits) by condensing channels / offerings. Cycling fans, like the fans of many other sports covered on Eurosport, will simply be collateral damage. 

I should imagine the fringe nature of many of the sports covered on Eurosport make it a hard advertising sale. So, whilst the historic economical production model pre-Discovery meant the channel washed its face, when factoring in larger corporate costs, shareholder returns etc. it doesn't pass muster infront of the finance team now. 

I can imagine that the accountants will have done their homework and know exactly what the drop off rate will be - significant - and have proceeded on the basis that even the worst case scenario (reference unsubscribers) will still leave them financially better off.  I can imagine they have already planned phase two as well, where, with demonstrable lack of specator interest, they negotiate better terms for broadcasting rights and manage to make even more cash... you gotta love the big corporate / capatilism machine! 

Im 80 years old, I still ride, my only interest other than cars, is cycling, im on minimum pension so near £400 a year is out, no interest in religion (football) so why pay, I canceled my SKY contract after 18 years, because I didnt watch that much for over £70 a month, so why pay £31,00 to watch one sport, and for those saying boycot, its the same as saying paying £12---to 18,000 for a bike is too much, and it is, BUT as with the £30.99, there are plenty will and can pay £15---£18,000 for a bike, BOYCOT wont work, so its good by, its a shame, watching a complete stage, start to finnish, was one way of getting a good sleep, I was forever speeding it up to get to the interesting part, THE FINNISH

I agree with some of the sentiments here, goodbye to watching the Tour, they were making huge money with ads, they didn't need to go to pay only to watch.  They already had horrible presentation of it from the commentators on up.

I stopped watching football and basketball due to the crappy announcers, and they took the fun out of the games, celebrating in the endzone, or taunting a quarterback after a sack is crucial to a game of physcological warfare, it also made the game fun to watch; basketball went through similar changes. 

No thanks, good bye, good riddance to the Tour, don't let the door hit it in the arse.

The whole point of investment in a scalable broadcast platform is that it enables many channels/subscriptions that target both well known and niche sports that are the maximum potential opportunity. The efficiency of the platform makes those niche sports viable, which they wouldn't be stand alone. If that wasn't true, platforms like You Tube wouldn't make a fortune from mainstream up to specialist content creators on their platform.

Bundling everything together in a single high cost package is not understanding the platform and how brands work. BT Sport was a worked example of how not to, and now Warner are determined to make the same mistakes.

That's a straight No Way...

This is ridiculous. The money won't go to cycling it's just to fill a black hole that is football. TNT are competing with Sky Sports in the UK&I and that platform is 99% focussed and aimed at football, with anything else a bit part.

theres a reason I never subscribe to Sky sports as I have no interest in the over inflated rubbish that irks football, but it's their be all and end all.

its pathetic that TNT are trying ti say you are getting all this extra, that the cycling watcher isn't interested in and you won't get football inspired fans suddenly wanton to watch hours of cycling.

its a total sham and I hope it fails miserably, but in all honesty are the cycling watching numbers going to make a difference if they don't subscribe, answer is no as it's all a smoke screen 

Was £7 too cheap? Maybe. I'd have accepted maybe £12-15. It's a niche enough sport that I know there are a few eyes to cover production costs, but if the question is over £15, my answer is "reduce production costs" (sorry Orla and Adam).

I had been optimistic that GCN+ and streaming-first delivery might have been the start of a viable micro-model of niche(ish) sports being offered at prices that reflected costs and targeted ads etc without the noise of the monolithic subscription and cross-subsidies. It seems the opposite has happened.

If it genuinely needs £31 per person to make it economically viable, the business model is fucked anyway. Fundamentally, £31 is probably a fantastic deal if you love all the sports, the problem is that if you only give a stuff about one of the sports, it gives the impression that you're paying for all of them, and the associated astronomical rights contracts, and that looks like a really shit deal. Basically, this feels like a miscalculation by people who don't understand their demographic.

A very strange pricing move by WBD. But surely they must believe they have data that shows whether anyone was desperately wanting to watch £31 worth of sport yet only paying £7.

Not me, I only re-subbed in November for the Cyclocross peak, and was already planning ending it after the 3 months - I was never willing to pay even £84 a year.

The only way you will get the prices down is to boycott the channel. For the sake of 1 season, just cancel your subscription or just don't sign up to begin with. When WB-Discovery realise no one is paying to watch they will lose so much money from subs and advertising they will have no choice but to abandon it. Vote with your feet / remote control. 
 

They need to realise this isn't premier league football. It's not week after week of top games that attract swathes of fans. You will get the hardcore element who like to watch every race or every kind, but most people will watch the TdF and a few classics and world champs. I don't really think many people are going to subscribe to watch a race that takes 3 weeks and watch every minute, let's face it, cycling isn't a thrill a minute sport. A good mountain stage will only really catch my attention in the final hour or so, classics I can take or leave. Mostly only the monuments. The small numbers of hardcore fans us t enough to support the channel going forward. 

It's a sport I love but it's ultimately dull for long periods. Watching 60-70 riders soft pedal through the French fields of sunflowers is like watching paint dry. I'd not subscribe to anything which can really be more watchable in 30 minute highlights on an evening. 

In fact if I didn't get to see cycling at all I would be disappointed but I'm really not going to bother my arse to subscribe to see it. Even at £3.99 I wouldn't bother. Many might say the era of Pogacar is exciting, I find the current era a bit dull and predictable. 
 

So if you want it back you can either pay the obscene money or take a deep breath and just say no. Go ride your own bike instead. Its free. 

criminal.
...but i just went through the cancellation proceedure on Disco+
which led to them offering the Premium (incl. TNT Sports) for £15.49p/m for the next 7 months.
still a huge hike and only a temporary reprieve,
but at least i can watch the Classics and cross fingers they'll amend their business model before the end of the cycling season?
if they don't - it may be the death of cycling in the UK.

VPN and figure out where stuff is on all the way. SBS in Aus for the Tour/Giro/Vuelta and a bunch of other races, UCI YouTube has shown the CX World Cup and will be showing the worlds (English commentary for both these). Then the aforementioned VRT, France TV, RAI etc will get most of the rest.

Since GCN+ got yanked, I've actually watched more races this year than probably forever - free but for the VPN cost and that gets a lot of other use anyway.

Marginally better: if you are an EE Broadband customer, you can go for the £20 TNT Sports package, which the D+ Help Chat has told me will include the cycling content (although not sure if it'll be ad free though). It's still a bitter pill of a price hike though from £6.99.

I currently get D+/TNT as part of my BT broadband package. I doubt that package will survive into 2026 without a substantial price hike, or they'll ditch TNT/D+ (which only came about beacuse TNT was previously BT Sport before they sold it to WBD). At that point, I'll go for a cheaper BB package and abandon cycling TV coverage - along with many others, I suspect.

Cycling on TV has never been more than a minority interest in UK; that's why ITV is not prepared to stump up the cash to continue live coverage of the Tour. As Ned said, not enough people cared. WBD will 'discover' that a whole load fewer will care at £370 a year. My big concern is that this will feed into a growing anti-cycling sentiment in this country. If it's not on TV, it's 'obvious' that no-one cares about it so why indulge it in normal life?

I wonder if this money grab is partly due to WBD having recoup the money they spent absorbing BT Sport and all the rights contracts that they massively overpaid for, which might explain the UK & Ireland specific move.

It seems there's a missed opportunity here, now that linear TV is on the way out, individual sports & events can be shown on their own stream, without having to take up space on a channel schedule. Surely a better approach would be to offer a "pick 'n mix" subscription, where one pays an amount based on the sports they want to watch, for example, if you like cycling and UFC ("it's a type of full contact combat, popular in the USA, m'lud"), that's £xxx per month, add on MotoGP and Formula E, that's £yyy a month. The only people I know who pay the full TNT Sports sub do it for the association football, with everything else thrown in as a by-product. It would probably bring in more revenue than the single "all you can eat" offering.

Go brush up on (or learn) your French, Italian, Spanish and/or Dutch, and use a VPN to watch your cycling. Belgian telly - VRT.be - is particularly good for cycling, and NOS in the Netherlands aren't bad either for things like the Tour, so knowing Dutch goes a long way. The Tour de France will always be free to air in France - it's the law! - so France 2 and 3 should always have it.

We're back to the dark ages as far as cycling coverage goes in the Celtic Isles. Never near complete to begin with, but at least there was always good Tour coverage with Imlach & Co. on C4 and later ITV, but now... It's VPNs.

Maybe one day the cycling authorities and orgs will learn that selling TV rights to big corporates that want to just lock it up to squeeze as much cash as possible out of the tiny minority that can afford stupid fees is bad for the sport overall. Till then.. VPNs.

After GCN+ went I was unprepared to pay for Discovery+ let alone this obscene amount for TNT. This is 10x the price i paid for GCN+. Ridiculous. I enjoyed watching ITV's Tour De France coverage, I know many criticise it, but for free to air it's great. Putting the rights completely behind a very expensive paywall is a good way to kill the sport. Dumb, greedy, short term thinking.

Four hundred quid a year for just cycling which is the only sport I watch online is too much I'm afraid. I've cancelled my Discovery+ subscription.