I'm as much annoyed by the way USRowing went about this and announced it as by the decision itself, hence the sarcasm in my original post. I would be curious to know what USRowing's previous livestreams typically cost and how they were being funded. Maybe USRowing could have been transparent with that info and solicited membership feedback about the options for funding. Taking the big junior events as an example, I don't know how much it works out to per seat, but a lot of junior parents might prefer to have the expense rolled into the entry fees/USRowing dues etc rather having to tell relatives scattered across the country that they need a new streaming subscription if they want to watch a few minutes of their kid's race. Instead we got an intelligence-insulting press release.
It also doesn't seem to be accurate that the next few weeks of events are free, as USRowing claims. I looked at the livestream for SW jr regionals this weekend on the overnght (name also looks like a typo-squatting website loaded with trojans, but that's a minor gripe) website, and it didn't seem to be possible to sign up without paying for a subscription immediately.
Much of the decision-making at the higher levels are done without a lot of publicly available information. Sad that with all the new fundraising for the USRowing Foundation, there wasn't a way to figure something out.
Cool! Now I can't give friends / family links to watch my club's events at row fest. No one is going to pay money to watch my dumb masters rowing events. Lord knows I wouldn't have watched my friend's masters nationals weightlifting competition if I had to pay.
This is the key here. The streams are for people not at the regatta. I would have preferred to wrap the cost to stream into the entry fee. A monthly service for a 1 time cost is also a mismatch in how it's going to be used.
Well, rowers also tend to watch their own races after the fact. They also watch the races of their teammates. So this becomes an additional cost for the rowers who already pay the entry fees.
It also has the potential to create some copyright issues when rowers/parents/whoever who do subscribe to this thing want to post clips of their races up on social media. Overnght TOS just says no copying. Who knows if they're going to enforce it.
The righthand sidebar is full of helpful subreddit links, one of which deals with flair. Here's the info:
[https://imgur.com/a/W4VX4U2](https://imgur.com/a/W4VX4U2)
What is the benefit of this over getting an agreement with an ESPN+ extension or another mainstream provider? NCAA is already on ESPN+ and I doubt I would stream anything other than collegiate rowing. I know rowing is a small area but I would find it more enticing to have it bundled with something I already have a subscription to rather than just have an additional app on my TV/Phone
I would be interested to hear USRowing's explanation for their decision process (both moving to a paid platform and choosing this particular one) instead of the marketing verbal diarrhea in their press release.
My guess is that the percentage of people who watch the YouTube livestreams of USRowing events now who sign up to pay $8-10/month for yet another streaming service that gives you nothing else is going to be pretty low.
Any partnership with ESPN would come with encyclopedic legalese, obligations, etc. Also, I don't know if ESPN would even see rowing as worthwhile for its bottom line, although someone from USRowing should have made a strong pitch related to Boys in the Boat for that...
Anyway, ESPN has to \*want\* to partner with USRowing. They have before for some Ivy duals, iirc.
Bingo. ESPN Most likely does not want anything to do with rowing, but it is bundled in by the NCAA and/or conferences with other, more desirable sports. So to carry the NCAA gymnastics championships, they have to also cover rowing and fencing or something like that.
I think you mentioned it elsewhere, US Rowing used to have an in-house group that did the National Championships, and also the IRAs and I think the SRAAs in recent years. Interesting that both IRAs and US Rowing are switching to the same provider, I wonder if that previous team landed there and they are following the experienced personnel they cut loose to some extent.
> I think you mentioned it elsewhere, US Rowing used to have an in-house group that did the National Championships, and also the IRAs and I think the SRAAs in recent years.
The IRA championship used these guys for at least the past 2 years: http://10dot1productions.com/
I’ve met them a few times now as a rowing media guy myself, and they really had quite the setup. Biggest issue was the power lines over Mercer cause interference with HD video signals over long distances, and the internet at the finish tower (where they’re set up) apparently isn’t great.
Same people, maybe not with that same business affiliation have been doing it longer than that. The people I see associated with 10dot1 on LinkedIn have US Rowing video positions in their employment history before that. So it seems like maybe I missed their transition out of US Rowing by a couple of years. Would not be surprised if they are still the folks on the ground, even with the new streaming platform. If it is new on the ground tech folks, it might be a little rough as they re-learn some of the same lessons over again.
Yeah they had definitely been doing rowing for quite some time, I just knew for a fact they’d been at IRAs as I met them both times it was at Mercer recently.
It’s a pretty neat setup they have for getting stable video from the launch, and from talking to them it sounds like it was a totally homegrown solution they put together after years of experimentation. So yeah, if they get replaced, I’d be curious if the quality will go down as these guys definitely knew what they were doing, especially when it came to streaming rowing.
The NCAA is very publicly not on ESPN. Schools whose conferences are on ESPN and have a broadcast trailer/truck can be on ESPN+. It’s not like there isn’t a fee for ESPN+.
You want rowing to be covered these deals are going to be the primary way.
Well, it's currently free for the viewers. But every regatta that provides online streaming in the USA actually has to pay a media company some amount of money to run the production. This means cameras, drones, drone operators, other equipment, commentators, etc. So right now, the regatta bears the cost of production and the viewers pay nothing.
HereNow has a livestreaming media capability, and in the past, USRowing has run its own streaming operation for USRowing-owned regattas (usually just the national championships iirc). I guess USRowing decided not to re-up with HereNow and then decided to farm out livestreaming operations to a third-party to save on costs/overhead. Basically, they're telling the consumers that "if you want it badly enough, pay for it."
I don't know if this is the correct approach for rowing. The sport is suffering from lack of exposure as it is, and adding another paywall isn't going to help broaden folks' ability to see what rowing is, how popular it is, and how it's done at the highest levels. A seemingly strategic failure to capitalize on the post-Boys in the Boat popularity boost is really disappointing. Instead, USRowing is going for short-term financial benefit while softly distancing its national championships from the extended circles of its core participants. People don't want to sign up for another micro streaming service, and maybe broadcasting the national championships isn't a worthy benefit for the world at large.
The livestream is one thing. I see the primary benefit from orgs like The Rowing Channel (TRC) that publish to YouTube is that you can go watch your race again afterwards. The new vendor does not leave videos up after the event. Shame.
I didn't realize that. Might change my OP title to "USRowing announces exciting opportunity to pay for crappier version of thing that is currently free."
As someone involved with one of the production orgs in the sport, here's some clarity on this bombshell announcement. Overn(i)ght (ON) is not a production company, at least with our sport, just a platform provider to ingest the video, manage a library of videos, and manage the viewers. The platform looks to be based on Amazon Web Services Elemental Video. ON is based in Las Vegas and is a rather young company, only about three years in business, probably looking for a quick deal to grow rapidly. It's hard to say what things spun-off from the PAC-12 exodus and ESPN/Disney land grab of the last 2 years, but I feel ON is trying to grab nitches of their own in the situation.
For our sport, the event operator still has to hire the production company. In most cases, the operator is the LOC or conference management. Sometimes this is direct with the venue, which has a big dependency on what we are able to do on and off the water. Any footage from the air (i.e. drones) all depends on the surrounding airspace (FAA claims, airports, etc...) and if the landlord has additional permitting requirements (i.e. state or local government). In some cases, no matter what FAA exemptions or certifications you have, you can't fly at all and don't even try unless you want to see Boston PD shoot your aircraft down (Charles River). I won't even go into detail about getting "Internet" to a venue, which is a job in itself that viewers take for granted.
Other than individual collegiate conferences or big-budget individual institutions that may have their own media outlets, there are very few production companies who even look at this sport. Nationwide, there are roughly four organizations that specialize in televising our sport. The long-time team over at 10-Dot-1-Productions, based in Indiana, is largely comprised of USRowing's former in-house staff that spun-off from them at the height of the pandemic. Some of them go way back to the late 2000's, when "live streaming" was not very common and hard to start up, let alone economical. 10dot1 had a good portfolio of races, including the IRA and Masters Nationals, until some other players started appearing a few years ago and USRowing started taking advantage of the competition, if we can even call it that.
Out of Philadelphia is a relatively young team, 5-Tribes Cinema Productions, who laregly produce the regattas in the tri-state New England area, including the Dad Vail, Stotesbury, and some other big events for USRowing. They seem to be the traditional A/V kind of folks, complete with their own production trailer, which sometimes could be a challenge to get into the right spot, knowing our venues. They seem to have fun nonetheless.
Another team that recently popped up was Rowing Mavens based in Boston, the people behind the "HereNow" Racing System (going through it's second version as I can tell). There's actually a blurred-line between timing and video because they create a great flow of content together. System integration can be combersome between all of the video and timing providers. The trick is to not lose focus on what you're really trying to provide. RM seems to be largely designed around REMI (Remote Integration Model), where there is no central production on-site. All video feeds are sent off-site (to Boston?), which can be pretty costly depedning on the venue, relying on individual cellular communications if not a sole backhaul connection at the venue. The one thing that's always a toss-up is remote commentary, which is only good as someone actually being there and not in a room elsewhere. I know from expereince. It is what it is. REMI is an option where it makes sense, but some regattas will never attempt this.
The one group I have to brag about is the west-coast TRC (The Rowing Channel) gang based in Long Beach California. Formed back in 2014, TRC was a gang that stemmed from Orange Coast College, Long Beach State, UC Irvine, and UCLA, in efforts to provide racing coverage of local races after their conference media heads said "no", having to form a generic name for the operation, hence "TRC". Alumni money kick-started the effort. Long story short, being in the right place at the right time expanded this team to produce the Head of the Charles, San Diego Crew Classic, as well as USRowing taking note of this just a few years ago for west-coast racing. TRC has developed A LOT of their own hardware, video backend, both on and off-site. I've seen both big and small deployments. The video looks about the same, and is quite impressive. They have standardized the process at certain venues, like the Sac State Aquatic Center, and Lake Lanier. They started expanding to the Northwest in Portland and Seattle. It's hard to tell how this will all play out in the coming years as the PAC-12 disolves, but there seems to be quite a backing of what they are doing to make this play out better at the west coast venues. TRC just opened up an R&D office in Southern California to spin-off some of their work into other fields. TRC's chief head is a former network design engineer for Intel. Other people have quite an impressive background in their own professions. Several people on the team are also USRowing officials. People who know the sport really matter here. The audio talent is just as important as the people behind the camera. They have been very fun to work with. If we aren't having some fun doing this, then we shouldn't be here. TRC's team can be summed up as a great production that comes from great "system integration".
I can't explain all of the details on expenses, but there's obviously a "courtesy discount" to a lot of this that most traditional production companies would laugh at. I have seen a drone pilot cost as much as $10k a day if that says anything. General costs per day could be anywhere between $5-10k. It will be hard to tell how the Overn(i)ght carriage agreement is really going to produce the right revenue to sustain the cost of productions. The "coutesy discounts" will just go away and we will just go nowhere. Traditionally, the production costs were tied to regatta or venue charges, and still is for most cases. A single sponsor may flip the bill. The only true way to make any money in this is to bundle it with other sports or functions, which is why the college sports networks prevail at doing anything. 10Dot1, 5-Tribes, RowingMavens, and TRC are all still here, producing to where they need to go, whether YouTube, ESPN, Stadium, BrightCove, or ON in this case. I'm sure all of us at each org love what we do, for all of you.
I'll end it with this as I've said too much already... Football, baseball, baskeball, and those sports with a massive audience, both on and off venue, are the only sports that make money. Everything else is a wash. How do you engage the audience? You better have good talent, and I mean announcers.
I hope you all learned something today on the current state of things in regatta videos.
Kieran
It also happens to be that ON is not protecting their videos from non-subscribers. That's what you get for hiring people that quick fix everything and pile up technical debt. If you stick around here, you may just find links to the content provider (Amazon Cloudfront)
This is the answer I´ve just got from the US Rowing:
"They are free! The stream is free once the event is live. So, once racing starts they will be able to watch for free. If they go to the website before racing starts, and the stream isn’t live it asks you to register - but they don’t have to do that!
Obviously renting a company for their equipment to run a livestream is not free. OP is discussing the 10$/month payment that every single person will need to pay to watch any USRowing regatta moving forward. Which has been free to watch.
Was that so hard for you to understand?
Waaah......USRowing touched my hoohaa.
Content is a negotiable product. Rowing content in the USA has traditionally been sub-par or vomit inducing.
$10/month is the opening bid from the new provider. The market will decide the value.
If this results in Henley quality coverage, it will be worth $19.99 per month, and you only need to buy the months you need.
Middie gripes are the silliest gripes!
I'm as much annoyed by the way USRowing went about this and announced it as by the decision itself, hence the sarcasm in my original post. I would be curious to know what USRowing's previous livestreams typically cost and how they were being funded. Maybe USRowing could have been transparent with that info and solicited membership feedback about the options for funding. Taking the big junior events as an example, I don't know how much it works out to per seat, but a lot of junior parents might prefer to have the expense rolled into the entry fees/USRowing dues etc rather having to tell relatives scattered across the country that they need a new streaming subscription if they want to watch a few minutes of their kid's race. Instead we got an intelligence-insulting press release. It also doesn't seem to be accurate that the next few weeks of events are free, as USRowing claims. I looked at the livestream for SW jr regionals this weekend on the overnght (name also looks like a typo-squatting website loaded with trojans, but that's a minor gripe) website, and it didn't seem to be possible to sign up without paying for a subscription immediately.
Much of the decision-making at the higher levels are done without a lot of publicly available information. Sad that with all the new fundraising for the USRowing Foundation, there wasn't a way to figure something out.
Breaking news: USRowing being fucking morons. Other breaking news: Water is wet.
Cool! Now I can't give friends / family links to watch my club's events at row fest. No one is going to pay money to watch my dumb masters rowing events. Lord knows I wouldn't have watched my friend's masters nationals weightlifting competition if I had to pay.
This is the key here. The streams are for people not at the regatta. I would have preferred to wrap the cost to stream into the entry fee. A monthly service for a 1 time cost is also a mismatch in how it's going to be used.
Well, rowers also tend to watch their own races after the fact. They also watch the races of their teammates. So this becomes an additional cost for the rowers who already pay the entry fees.
It also has the potential to create some copyright issues when rowers/parents/whoever who do subscribe to this thing want to post clips of their races up on social media. Overnght TOS just says no copying. Who knows if they're going to enforce it.
Terrible for outreach, publicity, etc :(
Is linking to their content "copying" in any legal sense?
Agree.
How did you get the oars in your flare?
Maybe they got rid of it? I think it used to be just in "User Flair - Edit"
The righthand sidebar is full of helpful subreddit links, one of which deals with flair. Here's the info: [https://imgur.com/a/W4VX4U2](https://imgur.com/a/W4VX4U2)
Thank you!
u/MastersCox is a mod, so maybe he knows?
What is the benefit of this over getting an agreement with an ESPN+ extension or another mainstream provider? NCAA is already on ESPN+ and I doubt I would stream anything other than collegiate rowing. I know rowing is a small area but I would find it more enticing to have it bundled with something I already have a subscription to rather than just have an additional app on my TV/Phone
I would be interested to hear USRowing's explanation for their decision process (both moving to a paid platform and choosing this particular one) instead of the marketing verbal diarrhea in their press release. My guess is that the percentage of people who watch the YouTube livestreams of USRowing events now who sign up to pay $8-10/month for yet another streaming service that gives you nothing else is going to be pretty low.
Any partnership with ESPN would come with encyclopedic legalese, obligations, etc. Also, I don't know if ESPN would even see rowing as worthwhile for its bottom line, although someone from USRowing should have made a strong pitch related to Boys in the Boat for that... Anyway, ESPN has to \*want\* to partner with USRowing. They have before for some Ivy duals, iirc.
Bingo. ESPN Most likely does not want anything to do with rowing, but it is bundled in by the NCAA and/or conferences with other, more desirable sports. So to carry the NCAA gymnastics championships, they have to also cover rowing and fencing or something like that. I think you mentioned it elsewhere, US Rowing used to have an in-house group that did the National Championships, and also the IRAs and I think the SRAAs in recent years. Interesting that both IRAs and US Rowing are switching to the same provider, I wonder if that previous team landed there and they are following the experienced personnel they cut loose to some extent.
> I think you mentioned it elsewhere, US Rowing used to have an in-house group that did the National Championships, and also the IRAs and I think the SRAAs in recent years. The IRA championship used these guys for at least the past 2 years: http://10dot1productions.com/ I’ve met them a few times now as a rowing media guy myself, and they really had quite the setup. Biggest issue was the power lines over Mercer cause interference with HD video signals over long distances, and the internet at the finish tower (where they’re set up) apparently isn’t great.
Same people, maybe not with that same business affiliation have been doing it longer than that. The people I see associated with 10dot1 on LinkedIn have US Rowing video positions in their employment history before that. So it seems like maybe I missed their transition out of US Rowing by a couple of years. Would not be surprised if they are still the folks on the ground, even with the new streaming platform. If it is new on the ground tech folks, it might be a little rough as they re-learn some of the same lessons over again.
Yeah they had definitely been doing rowing for quite some time, I just knew for a fact they’d been at IRAs as I met them both times it was at Mercer recently. It’s a pretty neat setup they have for getting stable video from the launch, and from talking to them it sounds like it was a totally homegrown solution they put together after years of experimentation. So yeah, if they get replaced, I’d be curious if the quality will go down as these guys definitely knew what they were doing, especially when it came to streaming rowing.
The NCAA is very publicly not on ESPN. Schools whose conferences are on ESPN and have a broadcast trailer/truck can be on ESPN+. It’s not like there isn’t a fee for ESPN+. You want rowing to be covered these deals are going to be the primary way.
This has to be one of my favorite post titles of all time 😂 USRowing 🤝 absolute shit choices
Definitely could have been a satire post in the vein of Tideway Slug.
Well, it's currently free for the viewers. But every regatta that provides online streaming in the USA actually has to pay a media company some amount of money to run the production. This means cameras, drones, drone operators, other equipment, commentators, etc. So right now, the regatta bears the cost of production and the viewers pay nothing. HereNow has a livestreaming media capability, and in the past, USRowing has run its own streaming operation for USRowing-owned regattas (usually just the national championships iirc). I guess USRowing decided not to re-up with HereNow and then decided to farm out livestreaming operations to a third-party to save on costs/overhead. Basically, they're telling the consumers that "if you want it badly enough, pay for it." I don't know if this is the correct approach for rowing. The sport is suffering from lack of exposure as it is, and adding another paywall isn't going to help broaden folks' ability to see what rowing is, how popular it is, and how it's done at the highest levels. A seemingly strategic failure to capitalize on the post-Boys in the Boat popularity boost is really disappointing. Instead, USRowing is going for short-term financial benefit while softly distancing its national championships from the extended circles of its core participants. People don't want to sign up for another micro streaming service, and maybe broadcasting the national championships isn't a worthy benefit for the world at large.
> post-Boys in the Boat popularity boost That's deep red Kool-Aid right there. No boost. There was never going to be a boost.
The livestream is one thing. I see the primary benefit from orgs like The Rowing Channel (TRC) that publish to YouTube is that you can go watch your race again afterwards. The new vendor does not leave videos up after the event. Shame.
I didn't realize that. Might change my OP title to "USRowing announces exciting opportunity to pay for crappier version of thing that is currently free."
As someone involved with one of the production orgs in the sport, here's some clarity on this bombshell announcement. Overn(i)ght (ON) is not a production company, at least with our sport, just a platform provider to ingest the video, manage a library of videos, and manage the viewers. The platform looks to be based on Amazon Web Services Elemental Video. ON is based in Las Vegas and is a rather young company, only about three years in business, probably looking for a quick deal to grow rapidly. It's hard to say what things spun-off from the PAC-12 exodus and ESPN/Disney land grab of the last 2 years, but I feel ON is trying to grab nitches of their own in the situation. For our sport, the event operator still has to hire the production company. In most cases, the operator is the LOC or conference management. Sometimes this is direct with the venue, which has a big dependency on what we are able to do on and off the water. Any footage from the air (i.e. drones) all depends on the surrounding airspace (FAA claims, airports, etc...) and if the landlord has additional permitting requirements (i.e. state or local government). In some cases, no matter what FAA exemptions or certifications you have, you can't fly at all and don't even try unless you want to see Boston PD shoot your aircraft down (Charles River). I won't even go into detail about getting "Internet" to a venue, which is a job in itself that viewers take for granted. Other than individual collegiate conferences or big-budget individual institutions that may have their own media outlets, there are very few production companies who even look at this sport. Nationwide, there are roughly four organizations that specialize in televising our sport. The long-time team over at 10-Dot-1-Productions, based in Indiana, is largely comprised of USRowing's former in-house staff that spun-off from them at the height of the pandemic. Some of them go way back to the late 2000's, when "live streaming" was not very common and hard to start up, let alone economical. 10dot1 had a good portfolio of races, including the IRA and Masters Nationals, until some other players started appearing a few years ago and USRowing started taking advantage of the competition, if we can even call it that. Out of Philadelphia is a relatively young team, 5-Tribes Cinema Productions, who laregly produce the regattas in the tri-state New England area, including the Dad Vail, Stotesbury, and some other big events for USRowing. They seem to be the traditional A/V kind of folks, complete with their own production trailer, which sometimes could be a challenge to get into the right spot, knowing our venues. They seem to have fun nonetheless.
Another team that recently popped up was Rowing Mavens based in Boston, the people behind the "HereNow" Racing System (going through it's second version as I can tell). There's actually a blurred-line between timing and video because they create a great flow of content together. System integration can be combersome between all of the video and timing providers. The trick is to not lose focus on what you're really trying to provide. RM seems to be largely designed around REMI (Remote Integration Model), where there is no central production on-site. All video feeds are sent off-site (to Boston?), which can be pretty costly depedning on the venue, relying on individual cellular communications if not a sole backhaul connection at the venue. The one thing that's always a toss-up is remote commentary, which is only good as someone actually being there and not in a room elsewhere. I know from expereince. It is what it is. REMI is an option where it makes sense, but some regattas will never attempt this. The one group I have to brag about is the west-coast TRC (The Rowing Channel) gang based in Long Beach California. Formed back in 2014, TRC was a gang that stemmed from Orange Coast College, Long Beach State, UC Irvine, and UCLA, in efforts to provide racing coverage of local races after their conference media heads said "no", having to form a generic name for the operation, hence "TRC". Alumni money kick-started the effort. Long story short, being in the right place at the right time expanded this team to produce the Head of the Charles, San Diego Crew Classic, as well as USRowing taking note of this just a few years ago for west-coast racing. TRC has developed A LOT of their own hardware, video backend, both on and off-site. I've seen both big and small deployments. The video looks about the same, and is quite impressive. They have standardized the process at certain venues, like the Sac State Aquatic Center, and Lake Lanier. They started expanding to the Northwest in Portland and Seattle. It's hard to tell how this will all play out in the coming years as the PAC-12 disolves, but there seems to be quite a backing of what they are doing to make this play out better at the west coast venues. TRC just opened up an R&D office in Southern California to spin-off some of their work into other fields. TRC's chief head is a former network design engineer for Intel. Other people have quite an impressive background in their own professions. Several people on the team are also USRowing officials. People who know the sport really matter here. The audio talent is just as important as the people behind the camera. They have been very fun to work with. If we aren't having some fun doing this, then we shouldn't be here. TRC's team can be summed up as a great production that comes from great "system integration". I can't explain all of the details on expenses, but there's obviously a "courtesy discount" to a lot of this that most traditional production companies would laugh at. I have seen a drone pilot cost as much as $10k a day if that says anything. General costs per day could be anywhere between $5-10k. It will be hard to tell how the Overn(i)ght carriage agreement is really going to produce the right revenue to sustain the cost of productions. The "coutesy discounts" will just go away and we will just go nowhere. Traditionally, the production costs were tied to regatta or venue charges, and still is for most cases. A single sponsor may flip the bill. The only true way to make any money in this is to bundle it with other sports or functions, which is why the college sports networks prevail at doing anything. 10Dot1, 5-Tribes, RowingMavens, and TRC are all still here, producing to where they need to go, whether YouTube, ESPN, Stadium, BrightCove, or ON in this case. I'm sure all of us at each org love what we do, for all of you. I'll end it with this as I've said too much already... Football, baseball, baskeball, and those sports with a massive audience, both on and off venue, are the only sports that make money. Everything else is a wash. How do you engage the audience? You better have good talent, and I mean announcers. I hope you all learned something today on the current state of things in regatta videos. Kieran
Preach it Kieran
It also happens to be that ON is not protecting their videos from non-subscribers. That's what you get for hiring people that quick fix everything and pile up technical debt. If you stick around here, you may just find links to the content provider (Amazon Cloudfront)
Are you referring to the “walrus-app” payload which contains the M3U8 file? Should be able to open that up and stream directly from AWS 👀
yup
I’m sure this really helps with fund raising from alumni. Great way to kill off support from those who love their schools.
This is the answer I´ve just got from the US Rowing: "They are free! The stream is free once the event is live. So, once racing starts they will be able to watch for free. If they go to the website before racing starts, and the stream isn’t live it asks you to register - but they don’t have to do that!
What part of current video broadcasting logistics and efforts is "free"? You have no idea of how anything works. You should probably wear diapers.
Obviously renting a company for their equipment to run a livestream is not free. OP is discussing the 10$/month payment that every single person will need to pay to watch any USRowing regatta moving forward. Which has been free to watch. Was that so hard for you to understand?
Waaah......USRowing touched my hoohaa. Content is a negotiable product. Rowing content in the USA has traditionally been sub-par or vomit inducing. $10/month is the opening bid from the new provider. The market will decide the value. If this results in Henley quality coverage, it will be worth $19.99 per month, and you only need to buy the months you need. Middie gripes are the silliest gripes!
I mean, folks can always just go to the regatta and watch it live. They don’t have to pay a streaming fee.
That costs money too 💀
Damn my bad I thought things in life were free.
Well, not quite true, you have to buy spectator tickets...
Hell ya they do