Originally posted at The Roar
The late-2013 announcement of television rights for the V8 Supercars for 2015 onward seemed big on bluster and trumpeting the everything-all-the-time coverage that fans could enjoy beginning in 2015, when Channel Ten and FOX Sports take over the broadcast rights from the Seven Network.
Of course, as is the case with so many announcements these days, the devil was buried very deep in the details – deep enough that, presumably, V8 Supercar executives hoped the real situation would not rear it’s ugly head to spoil the shiny gloss of the most expensive deal in the history of the sport, a whopping $241 million.
Now, on the eve of the first race of the new season, more details have been released and, for a regular fan who doesn’t have access to Foxtel, the sad reality is that they will only be able to watch six races a year in full – the Clipsal 500 in Adelaide, Townsville’s street race, Sandown 500, the Bathurst 1000, the Gold Coast 600 and the season-ending Sydney 500 at Olympic Park – and the rest will be delivered on Channel Ten (or One HD) in the form of one-hour highlights.
If you’ve got Foxtel, though, and you’re a diehard V8 fan, doubtless this morning’s announcement makes you feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven.
Why?
Because, beginning in about three hundred and sixty five days’ time, Foxtel, via FOX Sports (and, you would assume, it’s SPEED platform) you’ll get to see every practice and qualifying session, as well as Top Ten Shootout and, of course, the race itself, live, ad ad-free with high definition pictures. The one exception to that rule is Bathurst, where there will be the occasional ad break, which is to be expected in a race of five or six hours in length.
Full disclosure here: I have Foxtel. That makes this new broadcast deal pretty awesome for me. It’s the majority of fans – a huge majority if the comments on the V8 Supercars Facebook page are anything to go by – who are going to miss out on the bulk of their favourite sport. I am very lucky in this regard.
It’s no secret that a lot of V8 fans are from rural and other less-affluent areas, where life can be tough, and where money is, at times, hard to come by. A lot of people out there have trouble maintaining a consistent influx of money, or else they just manage to make their meagre income work across things like paying bills, buying food for, supporting children and keeping a car going. These fans obviously don’t have the luxury – like I do – of being able to pick up the phone, call Foxtel and get cable hooked up.
So what does that mean? Essentially, your favourite sport has sold out, going to pay television for the bulk of it’s season. If you’re without Foxtel, you have to go to races if you want to see most of the season – if there’s a race near you. Anyway, a race weekend is an expensive proposition in of itself, and not always possible.
The V8 Supercar announcement tries to spin the situation, talking about increased hours of television coverage – 1140 in total, up 360% from this year, but nearly all of that will be on Foxtel channels – and the fact that there will be primetime replays in Channel Ten and One-HD, which will supposedly open the sport up to new viewers.
Make no mistake: this is just the spin doctors at work, trying to make the best of a bad situation.
In this day and age, you can’t just whack a one-hour highlights show on television two or three hours after the race has ended. Channel Ten did that back in the day, with their 3pm-5pm Sunday slot (and Channel Seven for years before them), but things were different then. It was the Shell Championship Series, they raced AU Fords and VT Commodores and guys like Johnson, Bowe, Seton, Brock and Skaife were still driving.
Back then, Twitter and other forms of social media hadn’t been invented, and nor had internet streaming, legal or otherwise. There are simply too many ways for fans to find out the results of qualifying or the race. Try as you might, sometimes you just can’t avoid knowing who won. Short of turning off your phone, anyway.
No matter how you try to present the concept, to a real fan, no highlights package is ever the same as seeing the entire race.
Even if you’re the most diehard V8 fan – okay, maybe not you, but the bulk of other fans, I guess – what are the chances you’re going to sit at home and watch a condensed one-hour replay of a race that you probably already know the result of? Not good, I wouldn’t have thought. Especially not on a Saturday night. So, what then? You record the package and it sits on your DVR for another twelve or fourteen hours, and suddenly it’s Sunday. You’re more than likely to delete it, rather than watch it.
A few things that I do like from this deal: Channel Ten is bringing RPM back, Foxtel is retaining V8Xtra and launching a new show called Motorsports 360 – in the vein, I guess, of the popular AFL 360 show on FOX Footy – and there will be comprehensive internet streaming options. Being able to watch the race on your iPhone, iPad or Android whilst you\'re out and about is a tremendous concept.
Of course, aside from the RPM re-launch (an excellent show, that’s been sadly missing from our screens for too long), you’re going to have to pay for the privilege. As much as some fans might want to, the fact is that they can’t. They just don’t have the available funds. That’s sad, but it’s also a reality of life in Australia, and apparently the V8 Supercar people didn’t know that or else don’t care. Neither is that good, really.
However V8 Supercars spin this deal – and, they’re spinning it like a carnival ride at the moment – you can’t help but think they’ve just wound up and delivered a gut-punch to the rural and less-affluent areas that have been, for the longest time, the heartbeat of their fan base. How else do you explain taking all but six full race meetings off network television and replacing them with a one-hour highlights package?
It’s a cash grab, plain and simple. Foxtel, obviously, have plenty of money to throw at the series, because the nature of their work is subscription television (though I bet we’ll see a slight subscription increase as a result of this) and the dollar signs – all two hundred and fort one million of them – have obviously flashed in the eyes of CEO James Warburton and his staff, and they’ve jumped at the chance to make a massive amount of cash.
You can’t blame Foxtel. Essentially, I don’t. They’re doing what they think is best to secure good content for those who pay, sometimes up to a small fortune, for subscription television service. They now have a slice of every major sports product in Australia, and many of the world’s biggest. Their job is to expand their portfolio, and they’ve done it very well in this case. V8 racing is a solid get. Not as popular as in previous years, perhaps, but still with a solid fan base.
Ahh yes, that solid fan base. Will it dwindle now? How do you maintain interest in any sport if you can’t see the bulk of the races? Not easily. The sad thing here is that the V8 Supercar powers-that-be have obviously decided that a stack of cash is more important than keeping those fans who are the lifeblood of the sport happy and well-served.
This is a sad move, and one that doesn’t make sense. I mean, after one of the most competitive racing seasons in the history of touring car racing in Australia, V8 Supercars should be trying to expose their sport to more fans, not marginalising the fan base they already have.
I wonder if they’ll feel the same way if – or, is that ‘when’ – their traditional fan base crumbles away due to a lack of exposure? Five years is a long time to wait to make a change. Hopefully, for V8 racing, not too long.
The late-2013 announcement of television rights for the V8 Supercars for 2015 onward seemed big on bluster and trumpeting the everything-all-the-time coverage that fans could enjoy beginning in 2015, when Channel Ten and FOX Sports take over the broadcast rights from the Seven Network.
Of course, as is the case with so many announcements these days, the devil was buried very deep in the details – deep enough that, presumably, V8 Supercar executives hoped the real situation would not rear it’s ugly head to spoil the shiny gloss of the most expensive deal in the history of the sport, a whopping $241 million.
Now, on the eve of the first race of the new season, more details have been released and, for a regular fan who doesn’t have access to Foxtel, the sad reality is that they will only be able to watch six races a year in full – the Clipsal 500 in Adelaide, Townsville’s street race, Sandown 500, the Bathurst 1000, the Gold Coast 600 and the season-ending Sydney 500 at Olympic Park – and the rest will be delivered on Channel Ten (or One HD) in the form of one-hour highlights.
If you’ve got Foxtel, though, and you’re a diehard V8 fan, doubtless this morning’s announcement makes you feel like you’ve died and gone to heaven.
Why?
Because, beginning in about three hundred and sixty five days’ time, Foxtel, via FOX Sports (and, you would assume, it’s SPEED platform) you’ll get to see every practice and qualifying session, as well as Top Ten Shootout and, of course, the race itself, live, ad ad-free with high definition pictures. The one exception to that rule is Bathurst, where there will be the occasional ad break, which is to be expected in a race of five or six hours in length.
Full disclosure here: I have Foxtel. That makes this new broadcast deal pretty awesome for me. It’s the majority of fans – a huge majority if the comments on the V8 Supercars Facebook page are anything to go by – who are going to miss out on the bulk of their favourite sport. I am very lucky in this regard.
It’s no secret that a lot of V8 fans are from rural and other less-affluent areas, where life can be tough, and where money is, at times, hard to come by. A lot of people out there have trouble maintaining a consistent influx of money, or else they just manage to make their meagre income work across things like paying bills, buying food for, supporting children and keeping a car going. These fans obviously don’t have the luxury – like I do – of being able to pick up the phone, call Foxtel and get cable hooked up.
So what does that mean? Essentially, your favourite sport has sold out, going to pay television for the bulk of it’s season. If you’re without Foxtel, you have to go to races if you want to see most of the season – if there’s a race near you. Anyway, a race weekend is an expensive proposition in of itself, and not always possible.
The V8 Supercar announcement tries to spin the situation, talking about increased hours of television coverage – 1140 in total, up 360% from this year, but nearly all of that will be on Foxtel channels – and the fact that there will be primetime replays in Channel Ten and One-HD, which will supposedly open the sport up to new viewers.
Make no mistake: this is just the spin doctors at work, trying to make the best of a bad situation.
In this day and age, you can’t just whack a one-hour highlights show on television two or three hours after the race has ended. Channel Ten did that back in the day, with their 3pm-5pm Sunday slot (and Channel Seven for years before them), but things were different then. It was the Shell Championship Series, they raced AU Fords and VT Commodores and guys like Johnson, Bowe, Seton, Brock and Skaife were still driving.
Back then, Twitter and other forms of social media hadn’t been invented, and nor had internet streaming, legal or otherwise. There are simply too many ways for fans to find out the results of qualifying or the race. Try as you might, sometimes you just can’t avoid knowing who won. Short of turning off your phone, anyway.
No matter how you try to present the concept, to a real fan, no highlights package is ever the same as seeing the entire race.
Even if you’re the most diehard V8 fan – okay, maybe not you, but the bulk of other fans, I guess – what are the chances you’re going to sit at home and watch a condensed one-hour replay of a race that you probably already know the result of? Not good, I wouldn’t have thought. Especially not on a Saturday night. So, what then? You record the package and it sits on your DVR for another twelve or fourteen hours, and suddenly it’s Sunday. You’re more than likely to delete it, rather than watch it.
A few things that I do like from this deal: Channel Ten is bringing RPM back, Foxtel is retaining V8Xtra and launching a new show called Motorsports 360 – in the vein, I guess, of the popular AFL 360 show on FOX Footy – and there will be comprehensive internet streaming options. Being able to watch the race on your iPhone, iPad or Android whilst you\'re out and about is a tremendous concept.
Of course, aside from the RPM re-launch (an excellent show, that’s been sadly missing from our screens for too long), you’re going to have to pay for the privilege. As much as some fans might want to, the fact is that they can’t. They just don’t have the available funds. That’s sad, but it’s also a reality of life in Australia, and apparently the V8 Supercar people didn’t know that or else don’t care. Neither is that good, really.
However V8 Supercars spin this deal – and, they’re spinning it like a carnival ride at the moment – you can’t help but think they’ve just wound up and delivered a gut-punch to the rural and less-affluent areas that have been, for the longest time, the heartbeat of their fan base. How else do you explain taking all but six full race meetings off network television and replacing them with a one-hour highlights package?
It’s a cash grab, plain and simple. Foxtel, obviously, have plenty of money to throw at the series, because the nature of their work is subscription television (though I bet we’ll see a slight subscription increase as a result of this) and the dollar signs – all two hundred and fort one million of them – have obviously flashed in the eyes of CEO James Warburton and his staff, and they’ve jumped at the chance to make a massive amount of cash.
You can’t blame Foxtel. Essentially, I don’t. They’re doing what they think is best to secure good content for those who pay, sometimes up to a small fortune, for subscription television service. They now have a slice of every major sports product in Australia, and many of the world’s biggest. Their job is to expand their portfolio, and they’ve done it very well in this case. V8 racing is a solid get. Not as popular as in previous years, perhaps, but still with a solid fan base.
Ahh yes, that solid fan base. Will it dwindle now? How do you maintain interest in any sport if you can’t see the bulk of the races? Not easily. The sad thing here is that the V8 Supercar powers-that-be have obviously decided that a stack of cash is more important than keeping those fans who are the lifeblood of the sport happy and well-served.
This is a sad move, and one that doesn’t make sense. I mean, after one of the most competitive racing seasons in the history of touring car racing in Australia, V8 Supercars should be trying to expose their sport to more fans, not marginalising the fan base they already have.
I wonder if they’ll feel the same way if – or, is that ‘when’ – their traditional fan base crumbles away due to a lack of exposure? Five years is a long time to wait to make a change. Hopefully, for V8 racing, not too long.
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