Warner Brothers just announced a massive new paywall to watch pro cycling in on TNT Sports in the UK.
Owen investigates and explains what this means for the British pro cycling scene and what the future holds for grassroots and elite cycling in the UK.
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7 Comments
The loss of the Tour Series on YouTube sucked, and having no National Champs CX sucked this year. I hope the scene can survive though. You're doing amazing work! Hopefully will see you at some of the races in Leics
I dont know anyone who's going to pay it. Robbing gits. No excuse apart from greed, I know lots of none cyclists that watch on ITV 4.
This lot need to go and jump in the pacific greedy back pocket stuff for them. Greed!!! They need to be sued by European courts
On the subject of free to air coverage, I assume WBD will at least continue to air some TdF and Giro highlights on Quest as they have in previous years.
If so, perhaps WBD will take note of what it was in ITVs highlights that worked well in telling the story of the day’s racing, maybe even hire the production company and team who made it work, because I always found myself preferring to watch ITV4’s coverage even when I did have the GCN+ subscription.
I’ll miss the winter cyclocross: It’s good, but not worth £100 for the commentary!
Get 2 years worth of NordVPN for £68, then use an Aussie server and sign up to SBS Australia, you'll get loads of cycling for free, Aussies love their cycling reckon they subsidise it for the masses….
Same issue for cricket and most other sports sadly. Why do cycling fans consider themselves exceptional??
weirdly my takeaway from your video is Eurosport doesnt get that many viewers so actually its never been adding much to this bringing cycling to the masses take 😁 which is really about FTA coverage on major terrestrial channels like ITV or the BBC, to copy the ARD model, not about satellite channels or paywalls.the Sky/Cricket example, because clearly the Sky/PremierLeague thing hasnt impacted football participation, is not the cause of participation rates dropping, but the knock on effect of schools stopping playing the sport, selling off the playing fields & the village greens turned into housing estates
And if the British domestic racing seen was still in such rude health now, British Cycling wouldnt have had to setup a commission to work out why its nothing like the heady days of the 2012 olympics anymore and have been trying to recussitate it, and there might still have been some British based pro continental teams left to take part in the Tour of Britain going forward,
But again all thats happened whilst Eurosport was showing all of this "free" (well if you exclude you do pay to watch it) coverage, so how is it, that has happened ? we havent extrapolated to some terrible post paywall future where British cyclings membership numbers were crashing, the domestic racing scene had near enough packed up or the Tour of Britain(s) were at risk of not being run at all, as cycling on tv vanished, thats been happening now whilst you can still tune into Eurosport and fill your boots with days of cycling coverage.
maybe there are just bigger problems in cycling in the UK than Warner Bros Discovery.
It really feels like this was why they had anti-trust laws.