A Stream or a Trickle
If you want all the bike racing, it's going to cost you
OK, let’s get this out of the way first: My baseball writing has been nominated for an award, and you can vote on it!
My piece from November on how the popularity of empirical analysis has influenced MVP voting has been nominated for the SABR1 Analytics Conference Research Award for Contemporary Baseball Commentary. This is my third straight year being nominated, and I won in 2023. Got a nice little plaque for it. (Here’s a photo! I’m the guy in the pink blazer wearing two lanyards. I ended up wearing three lanyards by the end of the night, because I had to hit Diamondbacks training camp in the morning, go to the conference in the afternoon, and cover the World Baseball Classic at night.)
Anyway, I’d love to tell you that I’m too cool for awards and I don’t need validation, but that’d be a lie. I’m incredibly insecure, and therefore need constant validation, and so if you have a moment to go to this page on FanGraphs and vote, I’d be grateful. And also, if you have the time, read some of the other nominated pieces, because most of the other people who got nominated are either friends or colleagues of mine and they do great work. Plus they could probably all use a little validation too.
So this is actually what I wanted to write about last week, before an aside about how the U.S. is too big for a grand tour turned into a fanfic post about time trialing down the Jersey Shore.
For the record, just in case anyone from ASO is reading this, that post did numbers by my own pitiful standards. The American people2 are crying out for a stage race in the Mid-Atlantic, to cheer on Brandon McNulty or Matteo Jorgenson in the quest for the Maggie Pep.
With that said, where would you watch it?
Streaming cycling is getting…annoying. Time was, you could just subscribe to GCN+, and watch a bunch of races on basic cable in the U.S. through NBCSN and the Olympic Channel. Well, the streaming bubble, it is bursting, my friends.
What we took for granted as being reliable and affordable is now getting more balkanized, more expensive, and littered with ads. At least in the U.K., things are getting worse.
Warner Bros. Discovery is the big mover here; they were the ones behind shutting down GCN+ and the GCN app. Now, they’re building out TNT Sports in Europe, and by the end of this month it’s going to cost more than five times as much to watch cycling in the U.K. and Ireland: a staggering £30.99 per month.
Under end-stage capitalism, the ideal company makes no products, has no liabilities, no employees, no customers. It just sits there and appreciates in value as if by magic. David Zaslav run WBD in this manner, consolidating and slashing his company’s output and bullying publications into pulling negative coverage and generally showing contempt for TV and movies. You know, the things he’s ostensibly paid to make. I’m not sure Zaslav would know a bicycle if one ran over his foot, but shit always flows downhill.
This is a good time to flag a post from Beyond the Peloton, Spencer Martin’s excellent cycling newsletter, on how to watch pro cycling in the U.S.
One of the things I like about this sport is how decentralized its management is. The American model of one stable league with one championship is a bit stifling; even at the top level, cyclists and their teams can enter different races with a multitude of different goals and standards for success.
The downside is that those various races all have different organizers, with different streaming deals. If you want to watch all the big races—World Tour races, the world championships, the Olympics, various other odds and ends—you need three different subscriptions.
If you know the organizers, it’s easy to remember which race is on which channel: Flanders Classics on FloBikes; RCS on Max3; and ASO on NBC/Peacock, along with worlds and the Olympics. There are other races, but this will get you most of the way.
I subscribe to Peacock anyway so I can watch Premier League soccer, and Max…I guess it was because that’s where the good TV was, but I’m not really watching much there now that Succession is over. I also have the good fortune to have a close friend who’s the biggest auto racing sicko in the world, and he subscribes to FloSports so he can watch 480p coverage of super modified racing at 2 a.m. after his kids are in bed. I let him use my Hulu, and he lets me use his FloSports.
If you don’t have friends and you want to watch as much cycling as you can for as little money as possible, you could just try to find illegal streams. Which is how I watched, like, the Giro and shit when I was in my 20s. That’s somewhat less reliable than it used to be in the heady days of Steephill and Justin.tv; plus I’m almost 40 now. I have health insurance and a rapidly receding hairline; closing offshore betting popups so I can watch a highly pixelated bike race just feels like it’s beneath my dignity anymore.
In a vacuum, what I would do is subscribe to FloBikes and get a VPN4 to tell the internet cops that I’m actually in Canada, where FloSports has the rights to basically everything.
Because Beyond the Peloton did the math, and getting everything, completely aboveboard and without ads, costs $541.86 per annum. And that’s assuming that WBD continues to bundle its Bleacher Report-branded sports coverage in with the prime product. Which was not always the case.
As a value proposition, $541 per year (or 31 silly money tokens per month, if you’re in the UK), is not that bad for the idea of Watching Sports at Home. It took me longer than it should have to realize that something that looks expensive up front is often worth it if you’re going to use it a lot. I used to blanch at spending $60 for a video game, but if it has any kind of replay value, that’s a huge bargain if you consider that it costs $13 or whatever to go to a movie or $50 to have dinner and a couple beers at the local bar.
In my experience, there are two kinds of cycling fans. Some of them ride an hour each way to work, think about riding or racing all day while they’re on the clock, and wake up bright and early on Saturday or Sunday (or both!) to get a few hours in on a group ride or down a local bike path. These people love cycling.
For them, yeah, it’s probably worth the $500 per year to get every last minute of racing. They’ll surely spend more than that on energy gels and saddle cream and whatever else you hardcore weekend warriors think is important. If this is your primary hobby, it makes sense to spend a ton of money on it.
I’m the other kind of cycling fan. People like me like cycling because it’s a sport, and we will watch anything with either a ball and a scoreboard or wheels and a stopwatch. Baseball, football, soccer, boxing, NASCAR, team handball, Red Bull Flugtag, it matters not. We are sports omnivores. Actually “gluttons” might be the more accurate description, but I’m not going to use it because it’s unflattering.
People like us have to triage. I don’t know how universal this is, but when I was in high school, teachers assigned homework thinking, “What’s an hour of homework, that’s nothing. Start when you get off the bus and you’ll be done in plenty of time for dinner.” Only, you’ve got seven classes, and every teacher’s giving you homework that’s supposed to take an hour. Do it all the right way and you’d be up until midnight, at which point you have to be awake in six hours to catch the bus and do it all over again.
That’s kind of what it’s like to be a sports omnivore. $500 a year for cycling streaming is a lot when you’re paying for MLB.tv and ESPN plus for hockey and college football, and NFL Sunday Ticket, and going to games and maybe buying a jersey or a hat every so often…it’s just not doable. To say nothing of subscribing to the various publications that cover all your sport.
I recognize the irony of writing all this as someone who works for a single-sport site with a metered paywall, and writes a paid5 newsletter about a different single sport. (I will say that at this level, your money does actually go toward paying the people who make the stuff, instead of just funneling the wealth of civilization toward the David Zaslavs of the world.)
But I think about MLS a lot. As I said, I’m a huge soccer fan, and while my primary focus as a fan is on the Premier League, I have a Philadelphia Union scarf on the wall in my office. I went to their first-ever home game, and numerous games thereafter, as well as MLS games in Columbus and Atlanta…I followed the league at least casually, and watched the Union on local or national TV when they were on.
Now, MLS streams its games through Apple, on a package that isn’t included when you sign up to watch Severance or Slow Horses. I like MLS, want it to succeed, have strong ties to a local team…and I never for a second thought about signing up for the exclusive Apple tier.
For a long time, I had been of the opinion that MLB should offer a no-blackout MLB.tv service instead of relying on regional sports networks, but now I’m not so sure. After MLS went to Apple, I came to appreciate that my opinion was colored by the fact that I’m the kind of person who’d turn on a 10 p.m. Padres-Dodgers game even if I didn’t work in baseball.
The depth and exclusivity of a broadcast deal carries tradeoffs. It can either be universal and take in casual fans, or in-depth (ideally; practically these days that just means expensive) and for diehards.
Right now, there’s a lot of cycling out there where people might just stumble onto it, whether on Peacock or Max or the days when NBC televises the Tour de France. The profile of the sport in this country is such that catering to the diehards is probably the way to go. But if that’s ever going to change, streaming has to get simpler, easier, and way less expensive.
Society for American Baseball Research; the people they named sabermetrics after
For now, at least; God knows what country New Jersey’s going to be a part of in a year or two after they do all the legwork to set this race up
Zaslav owes Elon Musk big, because if not for Twitter turning into X, the HBO/Max changeover would go down as one of the biggest unforced branding errors in the history of showbiz
These are relatively cheap, like, a few bucks a month, and have applications other than streaming bike races
I’ll get back to setting up Ghost eventually
FloBikes in the US is the worst. Peacock you can get for cheap and a lot of credit cards will reimburse you for watching it. I like HBO so Max at least has a dual purpose.
FloBikes is just f’ing expensive for what you get. Yes, I want the Belgian classics but it’s just not cost effective.