Why isn’t buying cycling TV coverage just like buying beans?
Maybe that’s a bit of an odd question to start an op-ed piece on a cycling-focused website but, stay with me, it’s just an analogy that I used in a recent post on LinkedIn. A few people (let’s call them media marketing types) didn’t like my analogy, but a lot of people (i.e. cycling fans) certainly did.
I’m sure most of you reading this will be familiar with what I’m talking about, Warner Bros. Discovery’s recent price increase for televised cycling, rising from £6.99 to £30.99 a month.
Although this specific matter is only applicable to the UK and Ireland, it has clear messages and parallels for the rest of the world too.
To cut a long and complex story short, a few years prior to the 2022 merger that created Warner Bros. Discovery, Discovery had acquired both Eurosport and GCN, with all of their cycle race streaming coverage.
Following the demise of GCN+, the year of Discovery+ coverage that followed was very good, to be fair, even if the app was a bit clunky, but once you got used to avoiding stuff like “Aussie Gold Hunters” and “At home with the Rees-Moggs” (thanks, but no thanks) it was fine.
Then, just last week, came the bombshell. In their infinite wisdom, the media management people at WBD decided that this arrangement wasn’t maximising the income they could dredge out of the loyal fans of cycling and a number of other sports. Sorry, that’s not actually what they said, but, hey, have a look at their own words here in their media release. It takes a bit of effort to fight through the jargon, but the picture is pretty clear.
I mean, I’ve got nothing against people who want to spend their money watching those sports, but I don’t watch them. And neither do many, many other cycling fans, as the reactions on social media over the last few days pretty clearly demonstrate.
What’s also a bit of a giveaway here is that WBD will still be broadcasting Eurosport to “more than 50 territories across Europe”. I know the UK has had Brexit, and that’s another story, but Ireland is still part of the EU, so it can’t be an EU issue, can it?
Now here’s an interesting phrase that I’d never heard until this week: “price gouging”. Sounds painful, doesn’t it? I looked it up, here’s what Wikipedia has to say, it’s “a pejorative term for the practice of increasing the prices of goods, services, or commodities to a level much higher than is considered reasonable or fair by some”. Sounds about right.
So this is where my can of beans analogy comes in.
I like a particular brand of beans, which I can buy at a number of different supermarkets at a reasonable price. I don’t like any other brand of beans or any other sort of canned vegetables.
Now, all of a sudden, I find that in future I am only going to be able to buy these beans from one particular supermarket, and I will have to buy them as part of a package with several other brands of beans and canned vegetables that I don’t like and don’t ever eat. In fact, I might be a vegetarian, but I’m also going to have to pay for a regular supply of expensive steak that I am never going to eat.
I like eating and I’m going to need to keep eating, but I want to choose what I eat, and only pay for that. I’m more than happy to pay a fair price for what I eat, but I don’t want to pay for what some marketing bloke in the food industry tells me I’ve got to pay for, alongside the food I actually want to eat, whether I eat it or not.
So that’s it. Can you imagine any retailer of food or of any other product getting away with that? Here’s another analogy. If I enter a department store or go shopping online, I’m not forced to buy a business suit if I only want a t-shirt and jeans. That would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?
And there’s more. Can you imagine that company and people in that industry telling the people who objected that they just didn’t understand that industry?
I think the many people who are objecting to this move by WBD to scrap Eurosport in the UK and Ireland, to package its coverage of sports like cycling in with sports we don’t wish to watch, whilst hiking up the price for this combination by a ridiculous amount, well, I think we understand it very well indeed. And we don’t like it.
There’s a further issue that I have to mention too. After 2025, the Tour de France will not be shown on free-to-air television in the UK and Ireland at all, because that’s when the existing TV rights deals end. The reason that’s important is because many people became cycling fans because they discovered the Tour de France almost by chance, and fell in love with the sport.
Read the interviews with so many current professionals, men and women, and they will more often than not mention coming across the Tour on TV one summer, by chance. That’s not going to happen any more, and that’s a sad loss indeed, compounding the mess that WBD have made of this whole restructure.
What can be done to mitigate this doubly disastrous scenario? I don’t have a magical answer, but a rethink is clearly necessary. Of course, the media environment is changing and companies have to keep their shareholders’ need for profits in mind.
But those companies also need to remember that without loyal customers paying for their products and being satisfied that what they are receiving is good value for money, they won’t be profitable for very long. There are plenty of examples of companies that disappeared because they got that wrong, and not just in the wonderful world of broadcast and the media.
But hey, what do I know, I don’t understand the media business … I think it’s just like buying beans!
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