This is not great at all.
What a bummer.
The racing!! I hope Warner bro will figure out how we can watch the racing on a weekly basis.

Daved.

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http://www.theundergroundcoach.com

In Europe, it's a pivot over to the Discovery+ branding to show races via Eurosport, etc.

Nothing announced yet for anyone outside of the Euro zone.

Purely speculative -- but I'd imagine this means major changes to the PTO's content distribution model as well.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

What the hell am I supposed to do at work now?

Wow. Super disappointed for all of the GCN+ folks who have been generating terrific content. Personally, this is a big negative impact as I watched racing during indoor training and enjoyed the cycling news and feature videos. I suppose that WB/Disc will bundle GCN with other content and charge more than GCN+ alone. I'm sure that they have run the models and are confident that they will make more $ this way. But I'm confident that I won't go for the false economy of $1/channel/month for 50 channels all bundled together (or, whatever) - with only one channel that I'm interested in watching.

Hmmm... Why did Ryan pull the link to the YouTube announcement by GCN+. Is there something that he/ST knows about that announcement?

Back to Eurosport like decades before. Nothing like major companies coming together to limit access and make enjoying these sports shittier.

There are a few other really terrible cycling subscriptions available. Do your research because there are a few major brands that are absolute shite.

GCN plus has given us the best bike racing coverage we have ever had in the US, and at a very modest price. What did we pay - $50 a year....so about $4 a month for great bike racing coverage. Could even log on with a VPN to watch races not available in the US. As others have said i expect it is going to be bundled with lots of crap i have no interest in and the price will be much higher.

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And the question remains. where were you.

Ryan just embedded the video (by replacing the link with its youtu.be version you get from clicking on the "share" button on YT).

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"FTP is a bit 2015, don't you think?" - Gustav Iden

One of them tries to piss on its customers while gaslighting them that it’s only rain. This company, of course, is appropriately named Flo.

This is life altering. It is almost all I watch. Will we be able to subscribe to Eurosport then? I can't go to NBC coverage. I can't. I won't. This is not happening. I've evolved from reading 2 column inches in the paper the day after the race in the '80s to a full week's recap on NBC on the weekends in the 90's to finally being able to mainline cycling coverage almost 24/7. You can't rip this from me now.

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cock-up before conspiracy

Accept all our cookies and the YouTube embeds actually work as God intended.

(Also that means you help keep the lights on around here.)

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

Simply sad.

Considering the GCN+'s great value for relatively low money, it seems to me that it was just too good. Something like: "we'll decommission GCN+ and to all the current subscribers we'll offer a package for 4x the price. We estimate that only 1/3 of the current subscribers will accept the new deal, but doing so we'll net increase our revenue by 33%. In addition, the overlapping costs will marginally go down."

This was the operating model for cable companies, it seems we're shifting back to it slowly.

Basic pack had ESPN and Hallmark. If you wanted ESPN2 you had to buy an entire package that included Oxygen. God forbid you also wanted a local sports network, that would be tied in with The Oprah Network as well. Makes sense, every football fan I know can't miss a day of The View.

They did an excellent job of making sure the packages they offered were very horizontal, having one or two stations that the average person would be interested in, then stacking the other stations that same person would like into different tiers. This seems to be the same road we're going down now, albeit for different reasons.

Yeah, I don't know why they maybe didn't just try to jack up the price. I'd have easily paid double. It'd be interesting to know the details behind it. There were rumors that the app development - and the GCN+ app is genuinely slick - was just too expensive to maintain. Or maybe conventional media broadcasters like Eurosport cable got too upset at GCN+ taking over and just squeezed GCN+ with impossible licensing costs.

Yeah, U.S. FloBikes is like Uncle Bob's Discount Streaming compared to GCN+ (only at 3x the cost and 1/100th the # of races covered). I don't mind the announcers they use, but they're so cheap they normally won't hire two. And just one person talking is never anywhere near as good as the banter between two. What is the cost for having someone remote telework announce a bike race for a few hours. A couple hundred bucks? So cheap.

I will definitely go down the VPN rabbithole now as a U.S. viewer.

GCN and Eurosport have the same parent company / ownership. Both are the WB Discovery group.

Interesting.

Apparently, all of the GCN Content away from Racing will go on. Not sure how it will work in Europe but in North America, most of the Pro Race Coverage was streamed either on GCN or FloBikes - each one taking a bit of a different approach to it all. Full disclosure - I do Commentary for FloBikes for a few of the races that they pick up each year.

The question is, for Canada and the U.S. - what does this mean in terms of how we can access Coverage of European Races, because for easy math, we have just lost the ability to watch half of the racing that was available?

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

UK discovery+ standard plan is 7 GBP / month. PL Eurosport Extra plan is 30 PLN (7-8 USD) / month.

Annual ES coverage is 40£/ year. In other words, really inexpensive.

Much more difficult is spoofing the payment system to have it accept a credit card not issued in the EU/ UK.

Hmmm...I must have been a cookie disabler in a past life b/c I can't see the embedded link. But from 'profile settings / profile settings', I don't see a way to adjust the cookie settings despite this description: 'From here you can change your username, password, email addresses, user icon, signature, and cookie settings.' Happy to do the right thing if I can figure out how to do it! FWIW, I am automatically logged in upon access, so *some* cookies are accepted, I think...

Clear browser history and cache, come on back, then when Cookiebot pops up, accept all cookies (not just the "necessary" ones -- long story, but embedding YouTube is viewed as a marketing cookie.)

Or use a browser other than Firefox, because they like to disable everything these days.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

I was a new subscriber this year, only so I could watch the UCI WC mountain bike racing. Years prior, the race coverage was free via RedBull TV. The GCN+ coverage was worse and the app was terrible. Streaming was incredibly glitchy and painful to watch (via amazon fireTV). We had to clear the cache for ALL of the apps on the FireTV, reboot things, and then pray to the cycling gods that we might get clear streaming. We don't have to do this for any of the other things that we watch through our FireTV.

While the loss of broad content is sad, their UCI MTB coverage was definitely not great.

That's about the best way I could put it. Also, they have an amazing way of putting up a minute race recap on Youtube that spoils everything in the thumbnail. Whatever anyone does, I would highly suggest staying away from them.

Huh. I watch GCN+ through a Fire Cube and it's flawless and smooth. Previously, I used a Fire Stick and that worked, but seemed pretty underpowered so starting the app (any app!), navigation through the choices, etc. was sluggish (although the videos were fine). Not that any of this matters after mid-December. :(

David Zaslaz and Gunnar Wiedenfels are in cost cutting mode right now. WBD is carrying an obscene amount of debt at the moment and they need to drive down their costs ASAP. They are seemingly moving in the right direction at the moment, but their stock still took a hit after the most recent earnings report so there is still much cutting to be done.