One Cycling wants to rebuild a GCN-like streaming service
Pro cycling’s nascent reform project wants to fill the GCN+ shaped hole in your heart.
escapecollective.com
"The proposed
One Cycling project has a medium- to long-term ambition of developing a media hub that broadcasts all televised races, providing a single outlet for live cycling content similar to the glory days of GCN,
Escape Collective can reveal.
Major stakeholders within the sport are concerned over the loss of free-to-air race coverage at broadcasters like ITV, which will stop delivering the Tour de France to UK households after this year. The pending closure of Eurosport UK and the subsequent 443% price rise for British fans to continue watching cycling on TNT has prompted outcry among fans, and multiple WorldTour teams are preparing to express their own dismay with the broadcaster, according to sources inside those teams. They are concerned that a key market for both their respective teams and One Cycling will be priced out and viewership will drop."
One cycling spotting a passing band wagon they can hop on to exploit
Their solution is still pay walled, their solution is likely to want to extract more than an old GCN subscription because One Cyclings all about generating more money for the teams and where is that money coming from...that would be the fans wouldn't it.
Dazn who are their preferred broadcast partner are also quite as happy as the others to have pricing models that maximises their profits.
Really it's a press release complaining about others are making money, when really they're the ones who want that money in their bank accounts instead.
No one in this business is a charity and wants to give this stuff away for free anymore that time has passed, GCN worked because it capitalised on how low the value of broadcast rights to alot of cycling was at the time and so could exploit that value gap successfully and bring it together as a unique selling point.
GCN wouldn't be able to do that now even if they wanted to because cycling organisations & races mostly recognise the value of their broadcast rights, need to maximise their revenues as the costs to organise and run races have ballooned massively and so would make a GCN style setup pay alot more, which means their costs rise, which means either more advertising though cycling coverage really doesnt hit ad companies sweet spot, donkey sanctuaries, or their subs would have to increase.
Maybe it would double, triple even from what it was, would people pay that ? Probably not either, and they'd only be getting cycling for that sub.
Even if you disagree with the WBD pricing model from a cyclist fan only perspective you are getting alot of sport for that 30.99 sub, that clearly a whole bunch of people are willing to pay even before all of Eurosports content gets added to it.