Global sailing events - Free to air or Pay per View?
by Rob Kothe & Jedda Murphy on 27 Jul 2015
2015 Louis Vuitton America's Cup World Series Portsmouth Ian Roman
http://www.ianroman.com
The Louis Vuitton America's Cup World Series event in Portsmouth and the LandRover Extreme 40 series racing in Hamburg on the weekend, both with tightly packaged vision content, showed a bright future for modern spectator-friendly racing.
The LandRover Extreme 40 series has bootstrapped itself into a remarkably strong position in recent years, just by offering what audiences want, spectacular racing, with audiences close to the action and the Louis Vuitton World Series is following suite.
While sailing media have always enjoyed the breathtaking action on the start line from just below the pin, from the starboard lay line at the top mark and midcourse, the wider sailing audience have not had that privilege.
Now days on boat vision and sound delivers a whole new world.
Incredibly being on a media boat can these days rob sailing media of much of the race experience. Once upon a time, media centres emptied an hour before start time, as sailing journo’s headed on water. Now the big screens in the media centre are journo’s favourites and in increasing numbers they are leaving the on water experience to the camera guys.
Hearing Jimmy Spithill in the prestart screaming at Frank Camas, expletives and all in an aerial shot is much more revealing for journo’s and audiences alike than being on media boat 3, forty metres from the pin and either way that is much better than being trapped in the Fanzone shore-side.
For media, the post-race one on one interviews with skippers, such as those Sail-world has aired in this newsletter as part of its detailed event coverage becomes increasingly important.
Now to the fork in the road…
Streaming vision, free to the sailing audiences and TV networks has been delivering larger and larger audiences and ever better value for event and boat sponsors as the LandRover Extreme 40 series has shown.
A brave new experimental world opened up for the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series event, this week with AC+, delivering for US$7.99 the TV feed that it sells to TV stations.
It was notable that in sailing mad New Zealand, no TV station was prepared to pay the amount asked by the America’s Cup for the Portsmouth vision.
While some sailing aficionado’s stumped up for the Pay per view streaming feed, the total audience and exposure for both event and boat sponsors would have been just a fraction of what they would have received had they provided free streaming and free vision for the TV networks.
Especially when the increasingly online savvy sailing audience will by Round 2 in Gothenburg just how to watch the event via free streaming from one of the TV stations who has picked up event package.
The same scenario applied in most of Europe and North America and Asia.
While this model might work for Motor Sports, even Cricket, the fact is that sailing is still much more of a niche sport than mainstream and exposing large audiences to the action and excitement without the Pay per View premium seems like the best investment for all the players.
Portsmouth footfall was some 60,000 people on the only race day, wonderful for everyone and with UK sporting icon Sir Ben Ainslie figuring so prominently that may have been a great result in the UK, but that is less than 0.75% of the world’s population.
The question is Pay per View too early in sailing's new global product development, we think so but of course we are biased. What do you think?
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