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news
Cycling coverage moves to TNT SportsWarner Bros. Discovery tries to tempt disgruntled cycling fans back with half price for seven months offer sent to viewers who cancelled subscriptions
Disgruntled British cycling fans, who cancelled their Eurosport subscription following last week's announcement of a major price hike as part of racing coverage moving to TNT Sports, have reported being offered a half price £15.49-a-month deal for seven months.
The offer was first put before viewers last week, when road.cc readers reported being offered seven months of discovery+ Premium for £15.49-a-month, half of the £30.99 that cycling fans will soon pay monthly to watch the sport once Warner Bros. Discovery closes Eurosport in the UK and Ireland at the end of February and moves all its content over to TNT Sports.
> How to watch cycling for less now it's moving to £30.99-a-month TNT Sports
Now a week on, cycling fans who cancelled their subscription and ignored the attempt to get them to keep the package have reported being emailed the same offer again.
In the email, the news of Eurosport's impending closure is again communicated and a voucher code for seven months of discovery+ Premium at £15.49-a-month offered, the price rising to £30.99-a-month afterwards. "Here's your chance to get involved and grab a great deal on a subscription!" it states.
road.cc contacted Warner Bros. Discovery to ask how many cancellations there had been in the past week and whether the number is greater than expected at this stage. While there was no information offered on that front, Warner Bros. Discovery was keen to stress the £15.49 offer is not a reaction to cycling fans unsubscribing and has, as is fairly standard with other subscription services with many other companies, regularly been offered to customers who wished to cancel their plan, even from before last week's announcement.
The half price for seven months offer was seen, in a cycling context, last week as it was offered to disgruntled viewers cancelling their subscription following the price hike from £6.99-a-month to £30.99-a-month.
One road.cc reader who was offered the deal told us: "How nice of Warner Bros. ONLY £15.49-a-month."
Another reader who received the same offer added: "I cancelled mine last night. I was offered an 'exclusive' offer of seven months at £15.49, then whacked up to £30.99. I replied that I would happily pay £15 a month just for cycling but it fell on deaf ears. They will be surprised at the amount of people they assumed would subscribe who don't."
Warner Bros. Discovery's decision to close Eurosport and move cycling coverage to TNT Sports has been met with widespread criticism from fans and other figures within the sport.
Former UCI President Brian Cookson asked, "Can you imagine any retailer of any other product getting away with that?" He also asked if the broadcaster was "trying to kill cycling for your British customers?"
Using a baked bean analogy, Cookson said: "Here's an alternative way to look at this. I like a particular brand of baked beans, which I can buy at a number of different supermarkets at a reasonable price. I don't like any other beans or any other sort of canned vegetables.
"Now I find that in future I am only going to be able to buy these beans from one particular supermarket, and I will have to buy several other brands of beans and canned vegetables that I don't like and don't ever eat."
The former British Cycling president continued: "Can you imagine any retailer of any other product getting away with that? Can you imagine that company and people in that industry telling the people who objected that they just didn't understand that industry?"
Cookson's comments came in response to our story that fans were threatening to report Warner Bros. Discovery to the UK market regulator for "abuse of monopoly" and "price gouging".
British professional rider Tao Geoghegan Hart also commented on the situation, calling the move to TNT Sports and the consequent price hike a "huge problem".
He said: "For amateur riders, cycling has become a very expensive sport or passion. Now as a GB fan, following the upper echelons of the sport has also suddenly and massively increased in cost. I think it is now very relevant to realise where this money is going and where it is not. And perhaps to question the monopoly held over the sport's UK coverage."
Dan is the road.cc news editor and joined in 2020 having previously written about nearly every other sport under the sun for the Express, and the weird and wonderful world of non-league football for The Non-League Paper. Dan has been at road.cc for four years and mainly writes news and tech articles as well as the occasional feature. He has hopefully kept you entertained on the live blog too.
Never fast enough to take things on the bike too seriously, when he's not working you'll find him exploring the south of England by two wheels at a leisurely weekend pace, or enjoying his favourite Scottish roads when visiting family. Sometimes he'll even load up the bags and ride up the whole way, he's a bit strange like that.
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34 comments
The veg analogy is spot on. In the same manner that I despise sprouts I have no interest in watching football, not the English premier nor the second division and especially not 2nd or 3rd rate football from Spain or Portugal. And the same goes for a lot of the other "sport"!
Bundling up is just a route to give you more crap, bit like buying bankrupt stock where you might get one item that has debateable value but the rest of the pallet is utter crap.
If I wanted the one item that to me was worth something would I pay more for that? Perhaps. But don't rob me and try to tell me I am getting a good deal when you are just offloading a load of dross.
As they say don't piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining.
Cycling.Today has you covered for free. Tiz does as well but the moderation over there is a bit facist. Well, a queen mod rules it so it's a monarchy I guess.
I missed this, because I also deleted my account with the greedy money grabbing tools that they are.
I made a complaint to the CMA last week about monopoly like behaviour/price gouging but received a response the next day saying they could not investigate and OFCOM was the appropriate body. When I tried to make the same competition flavoured complaint to OFCOM, there wasn't really an option to do so, so I had to use an online form for a different type of complaint and hope they'll pick it up. I haven't had a reply yet. Not a great consumer experience and feels like a regulatory back hole. I hold out very little hope...
I have a NordVPN sub for using WiFi when travelling.
Has anyone had experience paying for a Eurosport sub in an English-commentary country (not Ireland as they are screwed along with UK. Hong Kong? Singapore?) and watching from the UK? Does Eurosport block NordVPN IP addresses?
Fortunately this year ITV will still broadcast TdF...
Your sub is tied to the country your credit card is registered to so it's not just about IP addresses.
How can that possibly work, in todays world where many (in the EU at least) use EMIs that are often registered in Lithuania?
Have to wonder whether they lost as many subscriptions as Strava with the ridiculous dumb crap they've done in the last year that decided I wasn't going to renew premium. I'll let local pub show the Grand Tours, Monuments, etc, and let them profit, but actually, good chance hardly any of that will be shown, so guess I'll miss out, as will sponsors on screen time. The immediate 50% off offer for 7 months is just pathetic.
The professional sport of cycling is going to lose sponsors, and when that happens the top riders will make less money.
Cycling is watched by 3.5 billion people worldwide, all they had to do was open it to the public for free and watch on a major network in Europe and here in America, the prices of advertising time skyrocket especially for the big Tour de France on a Eurpean network, American network might be a little weak. If American football superbowl can make $7 million per a single 30 second spot and do so with only 62.5 million viewers, and for just 3 to 4 hours, and the TDF is 21 days with up to 6 hours per day, imagine all the sponsor money that would flow!
Instead of doing that, they're cutting off their feet by going to a pay per view event, and people are rebelling. Good luck with that.
I agree with everything you say except that figure, which is extremely dubious; it would mean that half the world's population watches professional cycling when even the soccer World Cup doesn't achieve such figures*. The 3.5 billion viewers claim was made by the Tour organisers in 2014; that year when Yorkshire staged the Grand Depart the opening three stages attracted roughly 10% of the UK population to watch the world's biggest race in their own country so it seems pretty unlikely that 50% of the world's population tunes into cycling at some point in the year. The total European audience for the Tour last year was 150 million, or roughly 20% of the population, and Europe is far and away the keenest sport cycling continent. There don't seem to be any reliable worldwide cycling viewing figures but on that basis it would be surprising if they were above 500 million.
*The 2022 World Cup final had an estimated 1.5 billion worldwide viewers and even that figure is only achieved by including every viewer who watched at least one minute of coverage.
The figures for the Tour are always over optimistic - it makes ASO feel far better, and suits their narrative of owning the 'world's biggest sporting event'; which it simply isn't.
Halve the £15.49, and maybe, just maybe, I might consider staying.
I have just cancelled mine on principle, I can afford the £30.99 without missing it but refuse to be extrorted. I was offered the deal at £15.49 a month for 7 months. I said i would happily sign up for it if it was £15 a month full time, but they said no deal, it goes up to full price after 7 months. So i bid them goodbye.
Yes, I will miss the cycling but I refuse to have my pants pulled down.
AMEN!!!
I reckon Elon is behind this. 😁
Discount eh? Screw you!
Don't give in people. Tell them where to stick it. Stay strong, resist and we will get our sport back.
Like all the shops around Sept/Oct --- raise the price 10/20/30% and then for Christmas "Big" discounts of 10/15%! What a deal!
That's nice of Discovery +. I got it bundled for free in Sky Glass a few months ago and I have not recevied any half-price offer - and I can't cancel my subscription because I don't pay for one. I'm not paying £31.
"free"?
By that you mean you fell for exactly the same kind of packaging deal that TNT are offering, just that the contents are more to your liking.
I dont mean this in a horrible way but there's an arguement to be said that you are the proof of the TNT pudding - that big enormous packing offers do work.
TNT pudding sounds like a scene from Roadrunner. Meep meep.
Nothing is free in the world of business, you'll be paying for it somehow.
I don't mind paying for it. But I'm not paying £31 for it.
In the world of business, most classes of product offer consumers a choice of value propositions.
I don't for one second believe that WBD are surprised by the amount of cancelled subscriptions they have seen. To raise pricing as they have is a clear indication of their 'commitment' to cycling and other core Eurosport sports... i.e. there is none.
They aren't expecting people to cough up eventually, they aren't going to spend money developing an offering that allows sports specific siloed subscriptions, they have simply washed their hands of cycling and those other sports in the UK.
In my line of work, if we don't want a job or work with someone, we just provide a woefully uncompetitive quote... what we have been given by WBD is that inflated quote, the 'go away' proposition. Fans say 'F U WBD' and leave, WBD says 'Good riddance, bye bye profit munchers'.
I wonder what the UCI position is on this, as a lot of the sport has been anglified in recent years, removing what is an important fan base for sponsors can only have a negative impact.
Agreed, and I doubt the UCI are bothered as the main UCI organised races, which are the worlds, are still covered by the BBC. They might ponder the impact on their champions league track setup, but I don't think that's very viewer popular anyway.
And whilst alot of people mention the sponsors aspect, how many sponsors in the world tour actually have a UK angle, or are UK based ?
A reasonable number, actually, INEOS Grenadiers, Alpecin, Lidl, Red Bull all have a UK market presence...Decathlon have big sales over here, the two middle eastern and one eastern European sportswashing teams probably also value UK exposure, and all of the bike manufacturers would presumably want their products advertised to a UK market place. We wouldn't be the biggest loss to the sponsors if there was no coverage in the UK but I think big enough for them to make a fuss about it.
Well sure, I'm aware you can buy cans of Red Bull & bottles of Alpecin in the UK from your local Lidl. But none of those sponsors are UK based, it's Red Bull Austria, the Schwarz group and the Dr Wolff group both from Germany.
Do they really consider the UK market in their sponsorship decisions at world tour level ?
I believe, as is the case with a number of sporting governing bodies (in agreements with UK Government), the pinnacle/flagship International events must be made available on free-to-air television by law. The BBC most likely ends up with the UCI Worlds by default because the private FTA channels, ITV, 4, Channel Five etc don't want to bid for it.
I'm not sure the UCI worlds are on the protected sports list, as surely CX & MTB would be shown too, the Beeb probably just acquire it as part of wanting to show the world track championships.
The UCI sell their Worlds as a package; so the BBC can show Road, Track, MTB, Cyclocross, etc
Whether they do is another matter; they make a big thing of Road Worlds, and have presenters, reporters at the venue, but if they bother to show the others, they take the World feed......I don't remember seeing any stream of the CX Worlds on the BBC website this year.
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