Posts
744
Joined
10/14/2009
Location
Lenexa, KS, USA
Edited Date/Time
1/26/2012 12:55pm
NOT!!! they better not peddle backwards any further or else these guys will catch up!
United States Cross Country Snowmobile Racing Series, USCC
more NEWS... for this season we have expanded our race coverage, so tell your friends to join our FaceBook Page. We will host two webcams, PLUS via your smart phone you can listen and watch live on Ustream! Come on, how awesome is that? I will also be updating FaceBook with news, results, etc during event AND are also bringing back the trackSide program
United States Cross Country Snowmobile Racing Series, USCC
more NEWS... for this season we have expanded our race coverage, so tell your friends to join our FaceBook Page. We will host two webcams, PLUS via your smart phone you can listen and watch live on Ustream! Come on, how awesome is that? I will also be updating FaceBook with news, results, etc during event AND are also bringing back the trackSide program
ringling bros and disney on ice better step the fuck up to keep the dollars rolling in because Live Nation doesnt have anything left to sell to Feld!
Rocket scientists I tell you.
The Shop
Luxon 4-Post Bar Mounts
$189.95 - $239.95
DeCal Works Huge Plastic Inventory of UFO and Polisport kits.
3 guys (Weege, Holley, a tech guy) paid to travel/setup ect: figure 4500 a weekend
servers and bandwidth: 1000 a month
so figure, roughly, 80k for the season.
then you had a SX Live! sponsor or 3. figure you pull in 15k for the season (this is a WAG.. wild ass guess but a number that should be at the least doable)
subscription to listen in was what? $30 for the season? or 3.99 a race? (my memory is fail today)
10,000 subscribers for full season (this number probably is high but wouldnt be shocked if it was low either) 30 x 10000 = 300,000 plus the single race buyers.
hell, if it was 5000 listeners for full season and 20 for it thats still 100k and your server and bandwidth would reduce by half so that frees up 2500. so thats still a net of 35k to 37k.
I heard mention that it was part of their tv contract. 1 problem with that. Feld is having to PAY speed and CBS for the races. When you are PAYING, you can easily still let the content go out thru other sources. UNLESS the thinking was we are losing tv viewers because they listened in last night. which is the most head up ass thought in the world! The guys listening in ARE the core people, we dot care if we listened in the night before, if its on tv, we are there! Hell, we are there for the repeat at 2am also! so that doesnt hold water.
it's true, the numbers were impressively high at one point a few years ago. at one A-1 event the guys at the akami streaming service were reporting 177,000 listeners a few minutes before the main event gate dropped. we'll probably never see that again and it's absolutely dropped way off from those kinds of numbers in recent years.
as far as crew, its not three guys, it's usually five people in the facility and at least one other person off-site. the $4500 number might cover about 2.5 of those five people...maybe. cost varied based on the series locations. example: anaheim/phoenix was cheaper because of basing everything in socal for a few weeks. but i'd guess it's closer to $8,500 per event, including crew, talent and what-all.
bandwidth is probably closer to 3,500 a month, and don't forget, you have to get set-up at EVERY facility with at least two nice fat pipelines that are totally dedicated. those usually aren't house lines, so there's an install/un-install involved (a union guy with big tool belt, yellow do-nothing helmet, wire cutters and tan phone with alligator clips).
there's a lot of before/after work that surrounds each production too.
don't know how they did it the last few years, but for a long while, most of the sponsors were given web commercials as a bonus part of their package. commercials were never really a high ticket item. sponsors didn't pay for them, just got them added to the package when the webcast gained momentum.
i never heard that the webcast was a required part of the tv contract. new one on me.
as far as a break-even business model (which was always the goal, but never achieved), my guess is they'd need somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 paying listeners to break even, and i doubt they were anywhere close to that number.
if you think about it though, the really scary part about this whole thing is that it puts jimmy holley back out on public streets on saturday nights, and what with the overpopulation we already have on this planet, i think that just might not be a really good thing...
Post a reply to: Good thing FELD is stepping up!