Speedvision Sold, Future of Bike Programming?

Brent Plummer
by Brent Plummer
Speedvision president Jim Liberatore announced yesterday that, as part of their being acquired by Fox Cable Networks and reinventing themselves as "Speed Channel," they'll be focusing on NASCAR coverage, with an co-focus on automobile racing.

They don't mention anything about continuing with motorcycle racing, and repeated attempts to contact them have gone unanswered. Given the low readership of motorcycle racing we see here @MO, I'm betting that the viewship is weak -- even from 1994 to 1996 when MO was the only source of race results online, it never amounted to more than one percent of our readership -- doesn't have them doing backflips to resign the bike deals.

Making matters worse, we're fed up with dealing with Dorna and the AMA, and are considering cancelling all racing coverage -- for less than 1% of the readership, it's a significant cost that could be better spent on more motorcycle and product reviews that people actually read.

Here's a sample of life dealing with Dorna: "we have a website, why should we give you press passes" they quip. "Well," we respond, "you have a printer, why do you let print magazines in? If we're not there, we can't provide coverage for our readers, which, when I last checked, we have about 20,000 times the readership of your site, don't you want access to them?"

Dorna: "We don't care."
Hmmm... there's a business model.

That's the tip of the iceberg with race bodies, who just can't seem to care about the US market. For instance, we were trying to band the AMA together under Roadracing.Com (which I also own) to be the online source for AMA Superbike tickets. The promotors we talked to loved the idea, we were providing all the technology and order processing, but the AMA didn't bother to return calls about the plan -- though they were pretty excited when they thought we'd give them a couple hundred grand for "licensing" rights to sell tickets, which was pretty amusing (it was a shared revenue deal). And, wait, there's more... but we digress, it looks likely that race coverage is going to be pretty shabby here in the US next year.

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Brent Plummer
Brent Plummer

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