America’s Cup TV Coverage (and sailing in general)… PATHETIC
While I don’t expect to see much here in Australia since we don’t have a challenger, I would have expected that the rest of the world had better coverage, turns out that ACM (Alinghi) are being cheap skates.
Just like you can’t blame Valencia for forcing the LVC to be raced in Valencia’s “off season”, don’t blame Versus (formerly OLN) for the lack of TV coverage in the USA (and the rest of the world for that matter) — nor for the production values of the host broadcast. ACTV has a lot of people busting their humps to make it better. And while it is getting better, the whole TV situation for the Cup is and has been suspect from the very beginning when ACM put it together. ACM=SNG=Alinghi.
The only place that I’ve managed to see any America’s Cup sailing footage at all is on SBS news, which actually had a decent wrapup of the days racing when I saw it.
Scotty has been trying to find ways to watch it online. Why don’t more events broadcast over the internet to places where there is no broadcaster, hell I’m sure they could even make a few bucks off it, I’d pay to watch the Olympics (OK, maybe not Qingdao, though if there was some wind)… it really isn’t THAT hard to do a bit of geotargetting to keep users from broadcaster countries out.
Filed by Popeye at May 3rd, 2007 under Sailing