I’m sitting here this morning riveted as I “watch” the pivotal penultimate stage of the Giro d’Italia, the world’s second-biggest cycling race. But as will amost certainly be embarassing to me within a few years, I’m watching it via textual updates over the web. Not streaming video, not even streaming text updates — nor a weblog — but text entries dutifully updated every few minutes to give almost-live bulletins on the progress of cyclists high in the mountains in a race in far-away Italy.
I’ve been following cycling races this way since the mid-1990s, back when Miguel Indurain was winning his third or fourth Tour de France. Following races via web updates was, of course, a huge improvement on day-later finishers’ lists in your local paper, but it is remarkable how little the technology has changed since then. Yes, I can now catch same-day televised coverage of the Tour on OLN, but it is frustrating as heck how emphemeral that feels — next year without Lance Armstrong in the race I wonder if it will even be televised. And the Giro d’Italia … well, let’s just say who knows whether we’ll ever get consistent same-day coverage.
Either way, cycling is a made-for-web broadcast event. It is of worldwide interest, with devoted followers everywhere, but with so few (relatively speaking) in any given country (other than some European ones), that it is hard for traditional broadcast television to make the economics work. You see a flickering of that with the number of people trying to use BeelineTV to follow the Giro this year, with that site relaying Italian RAI Sport television signals over the web.
Let’s just say that the BeelineTV relay is better than nothing, but it’s also mostly unavailable, as even a minor tick-up in traffic makes the performance dreadful. It is as you would expect in the world of webcasting where, unlike in television, there is a negative network expernality, with every new streaming viewer implicitly taxing the performance of the people who were there beforehand. And until success stops breeding that sort of failure in web-based broadcasting we are going to be stuck with those darn text updates.
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As a past ski racer, I have experienced the same problem with ski races… I appreciate your concise words on it and if you find a good solution for biking in the coming years when Lance is no longer active I would love to hear about it. I got spoiled spending a few years living in europe watching these events live, I so wish I could could just purchace satellite access to them. By the way I think there will be some future changes in college sports, whereby smaller schools try to send their events over the interent.