That's specifically referring to advertising overreporting, which took place in a time period well before this one.

Facebook has since partnered with MOAT for ongoing viewability tracking, which measures the actual dwell time on a specific piece of content and measures the percentage of the piece of content that was viewable in screen. This is generally how you wind up with the discrepancy between initial impressions and actual views.

250K was about the ballpark figure I had. The only technical difficulty we had all day was the transition from the first to the second block (to those wondering, Facebook has a capacity limit for length, which is why you have to transition streams.) But even that was timed pretty well for us - didn't miss much of anything.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

Video quality was good. Streaming quality sucked big time and made the first couple of hours a hell of an experience.

After a couple of hours the stream was good and i could enjoy watching without buffering.

My internet connection is pretty good so i doubt it had to do with my connection.

It was the best live coverage of the event to date. I liked the pre-race coverage as well. Video and audio were consistently good. It was cool to see some new camera angles as well. I thought the crawl at the bottom with the splits was helpful. A few extra cameras showing what was going with the non-leaders would have made it better.

+1

If your NBC reference is to the show that will run on Saturday afternoon sometime soon, do you realize that show is basically an infomercial paid for by WTC? Two different goals with the live broadcast and the heavily produced Saturday afternoon show.

As to the Facebook coverage, I agree with you that the elimination of the sponsor commercials from previous years was great. Eliminating the plugs for the various WTC events throughout the coverage would be even better next year. :)

I had to refresh at least two dozen times during the 9 hours that I watched, but I was happy with the free coverage and I'm very pleased that I can watch the coverage again on demand on FB. As I've written in previous years, I would be willing to pay up to $30 for on demand coverage of the race that could compare to the ITU coverage. I realize that the nature of the IM course might make it impossible for WTC to provide ITU style coverage and break even, let alone profit from such coverage.

The NBC sports channel ran the coverage in the SoCal market from 9:30am til about 11:30am PST and then suddenly dropped it literally mid way through the first 20 miles of the bike leg and went to show a motorsports competition in Terre Haute, IN. I kid you not.

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Next races on the schedule: none at the moment

Every time I watch Ironman Now live my Facebook app crashes.

I had very little issues at all. It was by far the best live coverage of the race I have seen and I have watched/listened/anything possible since about the beginning.

Other than the somewhat clumsy transition from part 1 to part 2 I had VERY little difficulty, and our home internet is not exactly great. I was impressed by it and think that may be the future of live sports viewing.

Why would folks with "good" internet have problems?

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David
* Ironman for Life! (Blog) * IM Everyday Hero Video * Daggett Shuler Law *
Disclaimer: I have personal and professional relationships with many athletes, vendors, and organizations in the triathlon world.

I streamed the race from a hotel room since I was travelling. I found it interesting that my Amazon Fire Tablet wasn't capable of handling the live stream - the device would only show 2-3 seconds of the stream before crashing. After several frustrating attempts to restart the coverage on my Amazon Fire Tablet I switched to my iphone and had no further problems. The quality was great on my iphone, though the small screen wasn't ideal.

I had to drive around all day so I kept my phone on the passenger seat and listened to it all day.
It worked out great!!!

People complained about WTC only showing Kona on FB and I understand why, but I thought it was a smart move.

Livestream doesn't have the option for me to simply share what I am viewing to the masses on FB. Nor does it allow for my to engage in commentary while the race is going on. FB has the ability to do this. So if 250k watched it, it was also seen by all the people that are connected to those 250k either as "person x is watching Kona" or "Person X has commented on Kona livestream" etc.

Now if they split the option of viewing on FB and livestream, that 250k on FB might have only been 200 or 150k. But that would also be 50-100k that could not get Kona shared out to the masses.

I thought the move to a FB only platform as very intelligent. And yes it sucked for some, but it advertised this race, sport, even, etc to so many more that would never have been exposed if it wasn't done this way.

I thought the coverage took another step forward too. Yes improvements can always be made, and WTC has shown they work on that every year, but if you compare this coverage to even 5 years ago, it is leaps and bounds better.

Don't be fooled by his numbers. 52 million reached meant that it showed up on 52 million people's feeds. Ironman paid for that to happen. It doesn't mean they watched. All of their big numbers, while informative, are vanity metrics.

The safest number to look at was the near steady 50K viewers at any one time. Which for a global event is, of course, tiny in broader media world... why no network, etc would ever shoot live, etc. (The NBC filming, etc have always been marketing programs by Ironman. Ie. pay to put it on air.)

But for the most part... in my opinion, they are definitely getting better, even with a few hitches. But my guess is no a huge amount of investment goes into production... as audience will likely stay relatively static. Just my opinion, though.

I thought the video coverage/feed was great. Only hiccup was the "part 1" to "part 2" delay.

I'm not big on dumping on the commentators. I've done it once at a race, and I swear to god you realize how dumb you sound immediately after you say some things, but you keep going. And I had to cover about 2 hours of racing, pull my eyeballs out having to talk about lava fields and bike pacing for 8 hours. So I'm not much on dumping on Welchie for doing a good or bad job. I think that's a thankless job in that we'd dump on anyone really. Hearing them talk for that long it gets old, but that's the 9 hours of broadcasting.

I'm not smart enough to understand the move to FB or not. I would wonder with anyone cutting out social media accounts, is there a way to view FB content videos without an account? I think that is really the only big issue I have seen because as someone else put it, FB can take your info and pretty much do what it wants with it, etc.....alot of "small print" that you agree to when signing onto these social media platforms.


Would I pay for Kona broadcast? Yes, I'd likely pay $15-$20 but that's it. Can WTC make the broadcast work on that type of fee structure? Idk. I cord cutted 5+ years ago, so I pay for ITU racing (~$24ish a year) and Amazon prime (~$100ish I believe)....Those are my viewing pleasures. I would love to pay for TdF, I just dont want to pay the price for it...even though I think it's reasonable (I think it's $75 for the year getting all the events + TdF)...I just have to spend on certain things wisely....budget gets a little tighter when you go into coaching, lol.

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
-USAT Level II

Answering a couple things--

I thought Dede was the highlight of the broadcast - always on point, was able to correct Welchie when needed. She needs to be on all of their longer broadcasts.

You do not need a Facebook account to watch, just the URL to the page needed, so long as the content is set to Public. You might get prompted to log in, but it won't block the view of the content. It does, however, impact the ability to measure impressions/viewers and will reduce engagement rate.

They partnered with ASO for the broadcast - you could really tell based on the lack of camera issues, the quality of the graphics and production. A+ work in terms of presentation. I would have gladly paid for that. (I'm going to guess that Facebook would LOVE to monetize this on their platform so I'm sure that's forthcoming at some point!)

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter