Sad news
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.
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.
Sad news
https://youtu.be/…?si=8PKmNVbcKmthL_oi
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.
Ryan just embedded the video (by replacing the link with its youtu.be version you get from clicking on the “share” button on YT).
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.
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.
Accept all our cookies and the YouTube embeds actually work as God intended.
(Also that means you help keep the lights on around here.)
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Or maybe conventional media broadcasters like Eurosport cable got too upset at GCN+ taking over and just squeezed GCN+ with impossible licensing costs.
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?
I will definitely go down the VPN rabbithole now as a U.S. viewer.
UK discovery+ standard plan is 7 GBP / month. PL Eurosport Extra plan is 30 PLN (7-8 USD) / month.
I will definitely go down the VPN rabbithole now as a U.S. viewer.
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…