Road Bike Racing - OLN: The return for a rerun of "American Shooter" is more than the Vuelta

Here's a nice little quote from "velonews.com". It's from an interview with OLN's president, Gavin Harvey:

"I asked how much cost is involved with setting up Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen in one of OLN's Connecticut studios to do voiceover on top of Spanish TV's live feed. Sadly, it turns out the return is better when the network airs an 'American Shooter' rerun."

Velonews Story (half way down the page) (http://www.velonews.com/news/fea/6795.0.html)

I've been saying this for years. Cycling is such a fringe sport, and has SO FEW participants, and fans that even a LIVE Grand Tour cannot compete with fishing, and shooting RERUNS. Moreover, this is considering that OLN sends nobody to Spain, only doing a voiceover of the live feed! The few cycling fans in the States cannot even support that very minor overhead. Sadly, when Lance leaves the sport, there will be NO televised cycling coverage in the States. Sad, but true.

Those of you who like to watch cycling, but hate Lance (you know who you are!) .... get ready to swallow a pretty bitter pill. :( Today, I am cancelling my OLN. I've seen enough fishing this year.

God, let's hope the Discovery Channel does a better job of showing the bike races. I can't possibly see how Lance could do all that promotional and media stuff and not have the Discovery Channel commit to showing the races on their channel.

OLN sucks. I guess I'll be taking it out of my lineup too.

Koffee

At least they seem to be committed to Spring Classics and the Giro in addition to the TdF. Not much, but something.

Not sure there are too many Lance "haters" around here. It's a fallacy to equate a lack of absolute adoration with hatred. You are probably right that when LA goes so does what TV we have.

At least by running a 1 month "season" he might stay around awhile. :)

:beer:

Unless Lance does some spring races and the Giro, OLN will not be showing them.

Its funny that Koffee thinks OLN sucks when they are the only channel in the US that has ever shown any bike race live. (Except for the Olympics this year on USA network)
Bottom line is there is not enough of us cycling fans to make it worthwhile for live coverage. LA brings enough outside fans to make it worthwhile when he is in the race. If you want to blame someone blame him for not doing the Vuelta. I do hope the Discovery channel picks up coverage next year. What I really want is Eurosport! (entire races live).

Can you get Eurosport on one of the old-fashioned big satellite dishes? In English? I have been threatening to get one.

I just hope that if Discovery picks up some cycling coverage with thei rnew team that they don't turn into another OLN (Only Lance Network), but it'd be great if they showed that hey those other european guys in the peloton actually have a chance at winning races too!

Yeah, OLN sucks. They suck because they can't promote the sport beyond Lance. They suck because they don't care about developing what we all feel is a viable, exciting, money-making sport. They suck because they care more about flyfishing and bullfighting than cycling. Why should I pay for them to show me what amounts to about 2 months of coverage when the other 10 months out of the year, I don't ever even frequent the channel? And just reading the comments of the president really makes me realize how little they think of cycling. So I hope that Discovery Channel takes it over and runs with it and makes a packet of money. I'm already exploring how I can expand my channels so I can include all the Discovery Channel's television affiliates- I just hope they do a better job than OLN.

It's nice that OLN gave us the Classics (albeit not live), the Giro and the Tour de France, but they really led us to believe that they cared about cycling. Really, all they cared about was Lance, and once he moved on to the Discovery, they lost all interest. I don't feel grateful for that- shoot, I had to pay for the highest premium package in order to get OLN. They OWE it to me to give me what I want. If they can't, I'll drop them from my cable lineup and go with upgrading so that I can have every Discovery Channel option out there (I don't get the Travel Channel, so I gotta figure that one out still). And from the looks of it, they are committed to providing cycling, and although they are centering a lot of it around Lance and using his image to promote their other ventures, I have high hopes that they'll provide us with high quality coverage, more rounded coverage of cycling and the riders themselves, and we won't be left watching some two bit lineup centered around RVs and poker.

Koffee

PS- I want Eurosport too... I wish like crazy there was some way I could pick it up. I'd pay top dollar for that!

Koffee

Same here. I wish we could get eurosport. It looks like OLN in the US is going to be as bad as OLN canada where they only show the tour. I thought lance was supposed to be GOOD for cycling. Maybe he created more interest in the US, but it seems to have backfired. What happened most likely is that OLN blew such a big wad on the tour and all the lance stuff, they can't afford anything else.

"Samurai Sportsman" is pretty cool....check it out.

The rest is pretty sad...

G'day,

It's all about the almighty $...sadly for us, cycling doesn't seem to generate the return for TV stations. On Sturday night, we got the Olympic RR live & uninterrupted...yippee...sadly it rated only 4% of the audience...at those figures, we've got no chance of getting cycling on the tube on a regular basis,

sob,

Hitchy

OLN is not the right vehicle for cycling. They couldn't even sell out their advertising for the TDF as Lance went for his sixth win! Remember the DR Chipper/Mower spots during the TDF? I've always know these as P/I (per inquiry) and used to fill unsold air time.

Maybe Discovery will be better, but I think the best network for cycling coverage would be ESPN. If only they'd get their heads out of their butts and realize how many new viewers they could attract with cycling coverage. Yeah, the sports barflys wouldn't care for cycling but the airtime of most races is mornings/early afternoon so it could work.

I'm pretty sure that Discovery has already indicated that they will not be showing bike racing.

Maybe Discovery will be better, but I think the best network for cycling coverage would be ESPN. If only they'd get their heads out of their butts and realize how many new viewers they could attract with cycling coverage. Yeah, the sports barflys wouldn't care for cycling but the airtime of most races is mornings/early afternoon so it could work.

You figure if they can carry the National Spelling Bee (as riveting as that is), they could carry some cycling.

Finally read the article. As suspected, the 99ers are the reason we ain't getting the Vuelta.

FWIW, I sent an email to ESPN asking them to cover the Vuelta live. In their automated reply was an interesting PS....

P.S. Would you like to continue to express your opinions about ESPN and
play a part in the programming decisions that get made? Come join the
ESPN Viewer Panel where you can take surveys, earn prizes, and have your
voice heard.

Please go to http://www.espnviewerzone.com to sign up. You must complete
the registration process to qualify.

As suspected, the 99ers are the reason we ain't getting the Vuelta.

Where do you get that? If it were just the 99ers that decisions were made for then why would they show some of the classics and the Giro? I'd be asking why OLN can get ratings high enough to show the Giro, but can't for the Vuelta.

And without the 99ers we would all be sitting up at 2am waiting for Wide World of Sports to come on ESPN so we can get 1 week of TdF bunched into 45 minutes, forget other races like the Giro, Vuelta, Classics, etc. If you wanted any in-depth information on those you had to find a bookstore that carried some "lesser" know magazine (such as those from Europe, or Velonews, etc) just so you can read more than the 1-3 page article in Bicycling on the latest Grand Tour.

Andrew
Have you thanked a 99er today?

I've said before that it's the 99ers that are the reason we get all this coverage but they're also the reason why we'll lose it once Lance retires.

As the OLN director said, cycling viewership just dies after the TDF. There's a huge amount of people who forget about cycling for another year when August rolls around. If all the people who watched the TDF stayed, we'd have coverage of the Vuelta, Paris Tours, the Worlds and the Tour of Lombardy.

Ain't nothing wrong with 99ers. It's good for our sport. However, too many of them are focused solely on the TDF. Just look what happens here after the peloton hits Paris.

Well, without the 99ers, you wouldn't have gotten anything at all to begin with, so be thankful 99ers are around to give all the thankless snobs any kind of coverage to begin with, seeing as though they generated so little interest, they weren't getting anything before 99.

Koffee

I have to agree with Koffee 99.9%… I only sign up for OLN for the Tour coverage, and then, snip, off it goes (my wife wants me to keep the extra channels for the Style network-I don't mind the models much so they might stay).

It's a channel directed at those who normally wouldn't have anything to do with cycling. How many of you hunt? Bull riding??? Bull riding is offensive and vulgar. Is OLN to be renamed the red-neck/meathead channel? There is already the Outdoor Channel (on my satellite) for this type of programming. The 99ers who turn off their OLN after the Tour do so because there is no more cycling left to watch. OLN doesn't (didn't) grasp its long-term potential for grabbing a new and sustainable audience.

The lack of advertising during the Tour was a misjudgment of the execs in the corporations' advertising departments who should have seen the economical venue for their products marketing. If the DR Chipper can afford it, many others could have reached out to the cycling community, who, on the most part, have above average sophistication and buying power.

That's all. Go Magnus Backstedt!

I probably wasn't clear on what P/I means. Per Inquiry means if you call the 800 number on your screen that is an "inquiry" and this TV channel gets a small fee in exchange for you calling the 800 number.

I don't know for sure DR Chipper is P/I on TV. Not too long ago I worked in radio and this was a big P/I advertiser on radio.

So, in effect, P/I advertisers pay nothing for their ads unless they get a return first! This is also known as "filler" and gets inserted into unsold avails.

While many of you folks are *****ing about a for-profit network like OLN making decisions based upon, of all things, profit -Oh My God!- I don't hear any *****ing about the soviet people's subsidized network called PBS! There's your non-profit network to carry our little niche programming. Get those lazy pinkos off their collective asses and ask them to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into televising Croation Women's Track Cycling.

Harrumph. ;)

While many of you folks are *****ing about a for-profit network like OLN making decisions based upon, of all things, profit -Oh My God!- I don't hear any *****ing about the soviet people's subsidized network called PBS! There's your non-profit network to carry our little niche programming. Get those lazy pinkos off their collective asses and ask them to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into televising Croation Women's Track Cycling.

Harrumph. ;)

You mean like the 6 hour Major Taylor documentary series supposedly filmed but never shown on PBS?

You mean like the 6 hour Major Taylor documentary series supposedly filmed but never shown on PBS?


Yeah. Like that. ;)

Koffee

While many of you folks are *****ing about a for-profit network like OLN making decisions based upon, of all things, profit -Oh My God!- I don't hear any *****ing about the soviet people's subsidized network called PBS! There's your non-profit network to carry our little niche programming. Get those lazy pinkos off their collective asses and ask them to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into televising Croation Women's Track Cycling.

Harrumph. ;)

Your DR Chipper is in the mail.

I read it...

what I read was that they intend on showing the Giro and the classsics as they have in the past. That they could not even register a rating for the Vuelta the last two years (in other words, not even 100,000 viewers tuned in, probably due to the coverage being only on in the daytime, not rerun in the evening thus depending on Tivo and VCR recording) and made a business decision based on that fact. It's too bad, but I have run a large business (over 100 million in revenue) and sometimes business decisions can be difficult, although correct.
I also read that they intend on reviewing their stance next year, as well, to see if it is still the correct decision. I read that as "if Lance rides the Vuelta next year, we'll probably show it".
Discovery cannot show the Tour as OLN has the contract with the Tour organizers to show the race here in the US. They also are the official website in English for the Tour. Since the Tour's tenacles spread over many races, their races also fall under the contract. The Vuelta is not part of that.
What is too bad is that the Vuelta loses revenue, too. But this is not unprecedented. For example, the Giro was not shown 2 years ago in Spain due to a dispute over fees between the Italians and the Spanish, and since it was not shown, Once pulled out. The reason was that their sponsors were Spanish and not having the TV coverage in Spain was a waste of time.

It's too bad that an alternative could not be found...maybe a direct feed for a fee over the internet. I'd pay for that. Sadly, there is not much outside the box thinking anymore.

The Vuelta is my favorite of the three grand tours. Shorter stages make for better racing and the organizers did a lot to make their race more exciting...

BTW...for those that take and then cancel OLN for the month of July, only, they know that this occurs and is part of the reason why they chose not to show the Vuelta. Too bad your cable companies screw you like that, making you pay extra for a channel like OLN...Comcast, where I live, does not.
What OLN cannot quantify is whether your cancellations would NOT occur if they showed the Vuelta...but they can make an educated guess based on their rating facts.

What OLN cannot quantify is whether your cancellations would NOT occur if they showed the Vuelta...but they can make an educated guess based on their rating facts.

They can quantify @ least one of us. I sent them an e-mail message stating why I cancelled my subscription last week. I encourage the rest of you to do the same:

OLN E-Mail Feedback Form (http://ww2.olntv.com/feedback.asp)