I agree, there was definitely a route to a product that was a nice (albeit not enormous) profit making business. GCN+ never increased prices during a period of high inflation. I’m confident a 50% increase would have been paid by many.
But they also could have saved a few costs. I think an hours post race show with four presenters/pundits for just about every stage of every minor race, seemingly irrespective of the size of audience was excessive.
Eurosport player was a car crash a few years ago so I’m not confident in the new solution. Also, they will probably get less revenue from me. GCN+ £40 for a year, Discovery+ £6.99pcm so Feb-Jun equals £34.95 before I switch to ITV for the Tour and Vuelta
We don’t know yet……Discovery / WB has said more details will be available in the near future.
The good news is that they are a global streaming company and they also have the numbers of subscribers in other regions, so they have a good idea of what the market is. The likelihood is that they will use one of their other platforms for regions outside the US, we just don’t know what it will look like yet.
Steephill.tv was a good resource ( ) but they seemed to pull out when GCN+ came along.
GCN are indicating themselves it was a Warners organisational decision, rather than a profitability issue. I’ll guess we’ll never really know though and you are right folk more than likely would have paid twice the price for their service!
We must remember that they allowed us to fly under the radar with a VPN. They could have easily shut it down. Every other service (Google, Amazon Prime) detects when you are a VPN.
Honestly, it felt too good to be true. I was wondering when the ASO or some rights holder would complain and shut us down.
GCN+ with VPN, to me, was the complete peak of cycling tv coverage and documentaries. Amazing for $50/year.
NBC Gold was a partial solution with terrible commentary, with only a thin slice of races. I think I did two years of this.
The recent delayed highlights on Youtube (by GCN I believe) were actually really good, and I watched that a bit in 2023, even though I had GCN+ too.
FloTV and some other services with pretty expensive monthly subscriptions that didn’t appeal. I think I did one month of Flo or Sling and it was just all add’s and terrible commentary. I’m pretty sure I signed up for a month and cancelled after one day.
If there’s a Discovery+ option that sits somewhere between 1 and 2 above, then I’m in. And I’ll happily do PayPal and VPN to watch it. If there isn’t at least good extended highlights on YouTube, then I will have no option but to stop following cycling. Which will be a great shame after following pretty closely for nearly 25 years.
Organisational reasons at least make sense, sort of anyhow.
I was trying to work out how shuttering it would save enough money. Since they’re still streaming the races then CDN, encoding, player, infrastructure and assorted costs will remain broadly similar, maybe slightly reduced domain costs but other than the app team (which considering the state of it at times I don’t think can be much) they’re not going to save very much at all.
Although I feel they’re going to lose more income from people not moving over than they gain with the more expensive subscription. I know I’m not subbing, discovery in the past has been bloody terrible for closed captioning on lots of their channels, which in my household is a deal breaker.
This is also a strategy (my company does it). Not saying that is what they were up to, but it is more common than not in this space (think sharing Netflix password). Early on it is usually more beneficial to relax (or completely disregard) enforcement of VPN usage or sharing accounts.
If you are already a big player (Google, Amazon Prime), enforce it. If not, give the drug away for free (but not really, but sure, but not really, but ok…wink, wink youngsters with no money anyway), get 'em addicted, then go ahead and take that $20 that they are more than willing to pay at this point. That will at least cover the cost, time, and resources it takes to do the actual enforcement, which in and of itself can be costly.
I understand what GCN is doing but the other players, whose content they are allowing to slip by a VPN are much bigger (ASO, NBC/Peacock, Eurosport). I’m honestly surprised that those other players have allowed it to go on.
Also worth noting that the complaints would not have come from GCN, as they are benefitting from the VPN usage.
The complaints would have come from the license holders in other regions, who were not getting those viewers because they were going “around” the system to get the GCN coverage.
I’m intrigued. My vpn knowledge is that I purchased it to use gcn+, but if there is some cloaking thing I can learn how to do to continue to get coverage I’m 100% for operating in the shade (not professionally of course, no need to go to the SEC)[quote=“Skyewalkr, post:124, topic:88307, full:true”]
this is amateur talk. learn how to cloak your vpn man…
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yeah it’s not hard at all. just do some research and you’ll get there. now, some entities (google) take a bit more effort than others (netflix), but none are as absurd as the as good old government (china, iran) with their dpi’s and whatnot, yet all are easily overcome. the man cannot keep you down if you don’t want to be kept down…
for legal purposes, this information is for entertainment purposes only
) but they seemed to pull out when GCN+ came along.