News doesn’t have to be surprising to be disappointing. For months it was clear that the UCI was going to drop Red Bull.tv in favor of another broadcaster for its Mountain Bike World Cup series. The official announcement is now out, and you have to love the irony of not even being able to see the self-congratulatory video from Eurosport:
Red Bull.tv has provided excellent coverage of the series, reaching a worldwide audience with broadcasts in multiple languages … for free. Now the series is going to be yet another subscriber-only deal. There’s almost no free-to-view cycling anymore and it’s getting much harder to beat geographic restrictions. Meanwhile, the biggest sport in the world, soccer, is available for free every weekend to Americans who have 3 hours to blow on a 0-0 tie. Meanwhile, the biggest sport in America, NFL and college football, is available for free around the clock every autumn.
With each new broadcasting deal, the UCI says it is growing its market. Nonsense. You don’t make a sport more popular by making it harder to access. The only thing the UCI is growing is its bank account.
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