"A huge problem": Pro cycling disappearing behind £372-a-year TNT Sports paywall a "huge shame", Tao Geoghegan Hart says in lengthy post questioning "how many people have cancelled subscriptions" over price hike? + more on the live blog

I live in Renfrewshire, I never venture anywhere near Glasgow when out riding. The roads are atrocious and so is the quality of driving. I've had two close calls and both were in Braehead. As you say, police couldn't give a flying F.  Not had any other issues anywhere else. Thankfully there is lots of decent countryside for me to stick to instead. 

SarahKC wrote:

Worst is it's happening under an apparent 'socialist' government.

Don't think they've got a lot to do with it - pretty sure there's no golden share in Warner Bros Discovery.

mdavidford wrote:

SarahKC wrote:

Worst is it's happening under an apparent 'socialist' government.

Don't think they've got a lot to do with it - pretty sure there's no golden share in Warner Bros Discovery.

Plus I'm pretty sure that Labour has purged anyone left of centre by now anyway…

brooksby wrote:

mdavidford wrote:

SarahKC wrote:

Worst is it's happening under an apparent 'socialist' government.

Don't think they've got a lot to do with it - pretty sure there's no golden share in Warner Bros Discovery.

Plus I'm pretty sure that Labour has purged anyone left of centre by now anyway…

The 3 part Simon Schama series that was on has never been so timely, culture being art, music or sport has served as a common bridge in a increasingly tribally divided UK in past and most of it has been demolished from Cameron onwards (which as an artist I know all to well). Not much in UK to be cheerful about these days, removing affordable sports coverage is just another nail in coffin it seems (not just cycling, as tennis fans not happy either) and not great in a country that really needs to get people on bikes and out of cars.

Sadly, team sponsors are a long way down the pyramid of power here, as they get no TV money for races. Look to race organisers instead.

Sponsors' brands appearing positively on TV infront of the people they want to appear positive to is what they are paying for (in theory - in practice it's often personal vanity by a CEO).  The number of UK viewers who will see their logo just dropped making them renewing their sponsorship less likely - assuming a) they are being economically rational and b) they care about the people who cancel their subscription.  

I don't imagine the ProTour team principal sponsors care at all (especially the sportswashing ones) so I don't see them being the source of pressure.

And - frankly - I've no idea what would be in it for a race sponsor now.  UK race organisers must be putting their CVs together.  

Maybe people are being put off by the formula for showing the highlights show. The Eurosport offering seems to have evolved into 15-20 minutes of talking heads, where Orla gets to show off her legs and, depending on the stage, the last climb of the day or the final romp in to a sprint finish (cue screaming commentator, you know, the one who tries so hard to pronounce Italian words with a bogus Italian accent). Nothing else seems ever to be shown, unless some poor unfortunate comes a cropper on a fast descent and has to be stretchered off. Then you have Mr Stumblegums Kelly who does have a lot to say about the game but cannot seem to ameliorate his impenetrable speech patterns, now that he's in the  international communications business. Oh and by the way Sean, who do you think you are kidding, appearing on the box with a full head of Just For Men at the age of 68? Go silver or go home.
Let's also talk commentators. Phil Liggett and the late Paul Sherwin [RIP] were always going to be a tough act to follow, but I'm afraid the journalist Ned Boulting's output is p!ss poor, to put it mildly. Even when he is backed up by David Millar, who seems to be the only person in the whole ITV offering who actually has a clue what he is talking about.
So, in conclusion, will I be spending 31 squids a month for the TNT product? I'll let you guess.

stonojnr wrote:

What does Tao expect to happen ? Tv companies should just buy rights to show sport and give it away free at a loss ? They aren't the ones making big profits from this, they're charging an amount so they stop haemorrhaging money from these crazy deals they sign.

So stop signing the crazy deals. The logic 'I've paid a crazy amount for this monopoly but I'm now going to leverage that to maximise my profit' is certainly peek capitalism, but I'd say the general reaction to this issue isn't "it's good that WBD art doing this, well done for monopolising the rights and then charging us $450 a year", it's "WTAF".

It's the same psychopathic raison d'etre as the shit-stain on humanity who bought the rights to a cancer drug and arbitrarily hiked the cost. I know we're only talking sports coverage here, but this exactly what anti-monopoly and anti-competitive legislation is meant to protect against.

stonojnr wrote:

Tv companies should just buy rights to show sport and give it away free at a loss ? They aren't the ones making big profits from this, they're charging an amount so they stop haemorrhaging money from these crazy deals they sign.

Firstly, you're making a huge assumption that discovery+ was giving the cycling away free at a loss. I was paying my £6.99 a month so I wasn't getting it free and nor was anybody else. If that wasn't enough, let the broadcasters explain the balance sheet: if they pay N for the cycling rights and the income from £6.99 a month subscribers who mainly have a subscription for the cycling (they could easily discover this through customer surveys) plus the advertising revenue whilst showing the cycling adds up to less than N, fair enough, raise it to a point where it shows a profit. The fact that the company hasn't made any claim that they were making a loss on cycling, despite the opprobrium being heaped upon them, leads one to assume that they weren't and they have simply decided that they can make much more profit from cycling by forcing fans to pay for association football and so on as well, whether they want it or not. Obviously they have decided that more than one in five fans currently on a £6.99 subscription will bite the bullet and pay the £31.99 subscription, thereby increasing their profits. Hopefully, if the road.cc readership is representative of the average cycling fan, this will blow up in their faces.

As for "these crazy deals they sign", whose fault is that? There isn't exactly robust competition for the cycling rights in the UK, they could have stood up for the fans and said no, either you keep things reasonable or we walk and you get no revenue at all, rather than supinely kowtowing to the greed of ASO. If you went down the greengrocer's and found that bananas were suddenly £20 a kilo, and they explained that the supplier had suddenly started charging £15 a kilo wholesale, would you have sympathy with the greengrocer or would you say why on earth would you let them get away with that?

Rendel Harris wrote:

Obviously they have decided that more than one in five fans currently on a £6.99 subscription will bite the bullet and pay the £31.99 subscription, thereby increasing their profits. Hopefully, if the road.cc readership is representative of the average cycling fan, this will blow up in their faces.

I suspect the road.cc readership is indeed representative of the majority (although there do seem to be quite a few who will use anything that's free and then get all upset when seed funding runs out, salaries need to be paid and some features stop being free - see also Strava etc).  As you correctly observe, all that matters to WBD is whether there's a minority out there who will pay more and will be of interest to their advertisers.  I doubt they know either way at this point because it probably doesn't matter all that much; the numbers are likely driven by ball sports. 

Rendel Harris wrote:

If you went down the greengrocer's and found that bananas were suddenly £20 a kilo, and they explained that the supplier had suddenly started charging £15 a kilo wholesale, would you have sympathy with the greengrocer or would you say why on earth would you let them get away with that?

I'd just buy a different fruit, unless I was such a banana fan that I'd cut expenditure elsewhere to still be able to buy them.  Eventually the wholesaler would realise that there was a good reason bananas were the price they were before.  

This is a different problem.  In this case, the greengrocer is just saying "look, if you want bananas you have to buy my mixed fruit box and eat the apples etc or put them in the bin and I'm not reviewing the menu until 2028."  What's wrong is that there is no alternative greengrocer where one can still buy just bananas, even if it costs a little more.  

The situation only resolves when WBD's data analysts tell them the cycling was a waste of money and they should drop it from the package and let someone else (e.g. a GCN+ model) buy the rights when the current contract expires.  Which doesn't help us during the however many years it takes for them to figure that out, obviously.

No they aren't representive that's the point, if they were ITV would have had no issue signing off whatever the ASO/EBI deal asked for to get continued TdF coverage. WBD didn't bid for an exclusive deal, they ended up with one because ITV let them have it.

Rendel Harris wrote:

Obviously they have decided that more than one in five fans currently on a £6.99 subscription will bite the bullet and pay the £31.99 subscription, thereby increasing their profits.

Pedantically - more than one in 4.58.

[Though actually a bit less than that if they figure that there may be some people who might have cancelled but won't now they've got the cycling as well, some who aren't subscribed to either because they weren't quite sold on just what was on there previously, but cycling will tip them over the edge, etc. Probably not enough to get you to one in five, though.]

mdavidford wrote:

Rendel Harris wrote:

Obviously they have decided that more than one in five fans currently on a £6.99 subscription will bite the bullet and pay the £31.99 subscription, thereby increasing their profits.

Pedantically - more than one in 4.58.

Pedantically pedantically the "more than" to which I was referring was the one, rather than the five, so if they need, as you say, one in 4.58 to break even then they need more than one in five, no?

Consider for a moment their price hike means they can absorb a near 78% cancellation rate and still be revenue neutral on subs. That's how much they value your £6.99.

Sky charge £21,000 minimum per channel per year on their satellite system, Eurosport have 4 channels its basically 100k (you pay extra for good channel numbering) they save per year doing this, that's how much they value your £6.99.

I utterly despise the business model where a customer pays to be fed adverts.
If I'm being shown ads, then I know they are recording data about me and what ads I might interact with, therefore my data, and myself by association, are the product in their eyes, and I am not handing over more money for the privilege.
For a customer to be the product is ultimately a conflict of interests.

ROOTminus1 wrote:

I utterly despise the business model where a customer pays to be fed adverts. If I'm being shown ads, then I know they are recording data about me and what ads I might interact with, therefore my data, and myself by association, are the product in their eyes, and I am not handing over more money for the privilege. For a customer to be the product is ultimately a conflict of interests.

Enshittification, again…