NO, CONTENT DOESN’T
WANT TO BE FREE.
CONTENT WANTS TO
BE SUPPORTED; IT
WANTS TO BE VALUED.
helicopter during overhead shots, and it was
the most brilliant and pure thing I’ve ever
seen. But it was still on bundled pay TV.
Actual online streaming coverage had a
rough go of it for a while. Race fans were
either stuck with free, dodgy pirate streams
that promised digital herpes for your com-
puter, or paying for legit outlets which suf-
fered from glitchy, frozen feeds and crashed
websites. The solution was simple, if not
always easy: a VPN to access geo-restricted
coverage: R AI’s Giro broadcast, France2 for
the Tour, Sporza for the Classics.
Today, things have settled. There are two
legit providers of race coverage in the U.S.:
NBC Sports and FloBikes. Their calendars
largely complement; there are exceptions,
but generally what one covers, the other
doesn’t. And you can get year-round access
to both for $200. They show events live. They
offer on-demand replay if the live broadcast
doesn’t work for your schedule. They offer
smooth, reliable, high-definition coverage.
The problem is that this all settled well
after we also seem to have culturally settled,
without much debate, the idea that creative
content online—TV shows, journalism,
music—should be free. This is a stubborn
anachronism from the web’s early days,
before legacy media companies realized the
opportunity digital offered; before Google
hoovered up ad dollars; before social media
provided sharply filtered ad targeting that
made outlets like Bicycling seem like hope-
lessly blunt tools.
So I see people on social on a Sunday
morning asking “anyone got a feed for Tro
Bro Leon, bro?” I see them trading advice
on the best VPNs for scamming free cover-
age from European broadcasters. In short,I see a bunch of mouth-breathing chiselers
who don’t understand how the economics
of this really works.
See, most of the European channels that
show bike racing are publicly owned. R AI is
owned by Italy’s Ministry of Economy and
Finance; VRT’s Sporza is financed by the
Flemish government; and France2 is part
of state-owned France Télévisions. They’re
not only legally obligated to show important
national races, their public funding means
they don’t have to turn a profit on them.
That’s not the case for, say, Flo. And the pro
racing audience, in the U.S. at least, ain’t all
that big. So if that audience is artificially
made smaller by a bunch of race fans who
decide that they’re too cheap to pay reason-
able amounts for a legit coverage option,
then free-market companies like Flo will
decide U.S. rights aren’t worth it, and the
choice will be don’t watch, or steal coverage.
Sometimes people justify piracy based
on their dislike of the U.S. commentary,
preferring more erudite Euro options. So
mute it. Play Sporza radio, which isn’t geo-
restricted and will teach you Flemish. Or
make up your own commentary.
But if you like racing enough to watch,
like it enough to support the outlets that
work to bring it to you legitimately. It’s a
good product; it’s not that expensive; and if
it fails because you cheapskates decided that
you didn’t want to pay for it, then you’ve
forced me into accepting your bullshit ethics
or miss out entirely.
No, CONTENT doesn’t want to be free.
Content wants to be supported; content
wants to be valued; content wants to be
P-A-I-D, so that content is there the next
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