Next season. Cancel BT deal and take broadcasting inhouse.

[Steve Shovlar]

Just now, Reliant Robin said:

Correct, BT do not pay the hosting Club. They pay BSPA a license fee for the season which is then distributed how BSPA see fit. Equates to a lot more than the initial £3k per meeting you had said.

Each club receive £13,000 a year. Not enough to cover the loss of punters for a single meeting let alone multiple meetings.  

[BurntFaceMan]

8 minutes ago, Steve Shovlar said:

Each club receive £13,000 a year. Not enough to cover the loss of punters for a single meeting let alone multiple meetings.  

So they pay the BSPA now and not Go Speed? Do you know what happened to Go Speed? 

[Reliant Robin]

7 minutes ago, Steve Shovlar said:

Each club receive £13,000 a year. Not enough to cover the loss of punters for a single meeting let alone multiple meetings.  

£13,000 is still a lot more than you were originally saying. Bearing in mind that generally, each Club will have one home meeting covered by BT (exc Playoffs), what else do Clubs have to do for this money? Going on what I read on here, £13,000 is the equivalent of some Clubs gates.

On top of that, all Clubs have their contribution to BSPA admin paid for, including Championship Clubs. I would guesstimate that BSPA are receiving around £250,000 a year for TV, plus a bit more from abroad.

[Steve Shovlar]

You are making out 13,000 is decent. It’s a complete insult and not even chicken feed  I would tell bt no more until you pay a proper price.  

No idea what's happened to gospeed. 

[Reliant Robin]

2 minutes ago, Steve Shovlar said:

You are making out 13,000 is decent. It’s a complete insult and not even chicken feed  I would tell bt no more until you pay a proper price.  

No idea what's happened to gospeed. 

Not at all, I'm making out that £250,000 + is better than the zero originally suggested. I am also reasoning that Speedway in UK at this moment in time is not worth much more. I am also reasoning that Clubs have very few obligations for the money they receive. One home meeting covered on TV.

[ouch]

1 hour ago, Reliant Robin said:

Correct, BT do not pay the hosting Club. They pay BSPA a license fee for the season which is then distributed how BSPA see fit. Equates to a lot more than the initial £3k per meeting you had said.

Less 10% lol. 

[Harry The Goat]

5 hours ago, BurntFaceMan said:

I was working directly with Wayne Russell to get this service off the ground and we spent a good 5 years trying to get everybody on board. It was initially going to be a Netflix style service, at a similar monthly cost (around the £9 - £12 mark), offering the trackside recorded meetings (as an alternative to DVD sales). Our company specialises in programming and producing web interfaces so we were in the perfect position to take matters forward.

We had offered a solution that would generate significant revenue for the sport whilst catering to each individual promoters objections. The revenue we had forecast was significant enough for Wayne to refer to it as a "viable alternative to Sky". We had provided a 5 year development plan to boost attendance and finally drive social media in the way any other professional sport does. Unfortunately the response I kept receiving from Wayne is that him and some of the promoters were desperate to move forward, but that they couldn't without everybody on board. He went as far as to say there were actually promoters who preferred no coverage at all as they believed this would work in the sports favour. The word "dinosaur" was used on many occasions.

To say we put an awful lot of work into this is an understatement. When we first started this project we had the issue of Sky refusing to release the rights to stream recorded speedway matches. Sky owned the rights to every single form of British Speedway media except DVD sales. I spoke extensively with Hannah Brown and she concluded by saying that "although speedway is a small sport, it has a strong and loyal following, and we are not willing to release the rights". Not long after they ditched speedway entirely...

Wayne then went back to the table to renegotiate the rights with Sky, and informed me that he had successfully acquired these rights in the new contract, and that it was now the promoters holding them back. 

Early this year we started making more progress and then suddenly overnight Wayne and Go Speed disappeared. In our final proposal we had even offered to cover the entire start up costs ourselves (approx £10,000) and work entirely profit free for the first 2 years. But even this wasn't enough. Wayne came back and asked our company to underwrite our projections so that we would pay the forecast ourselves even if the business failed! Obviously this was never going to be an option for us.

The sport has now reached a point where it would be difficult to make a service like this and maintain profitability. It would require nothing less than the full support of each club (trackside advertising, programme advertising, website advertising) and a complete revamp of social media. It is still doable, but every year the quality reduces so heavily that the product becomes almost impossible to market.

I had intended to keep this private, but after working for years and years to try and help this sport move into the 21st century, I think it's important for fans to understand that it's their own promoters who are holding them back. They simply aren't willing to embrace the modern era.

This is why I believe the sport is doomed. I have attempted to make contact with every single promoter in the sport, I have had lengthly discussions with Sky and Go Speed, I have put options on the table to really help drive speedway into the digital age and I have been met with nothing but resistance.

The only exception to this was Swindon who (in my opinion) are possibly the only club interested in moving into the 21st century. There was another very popular club (which I will not name) that ignored all our communications for 2 years before desperately emailing us from their personal email address for help when their attendances started dropping. 

Long story short: Speedway on a whole doesn't want to be helped.

Edit: I will say that some clubs like Kings Lynn are trying harder with their social media now (because finally they have no choice!). But they aren't getting it right. They really do need somebody with more experience to get the right kind of content to the right audience.

Huge applause to you BurntFaceMan for all your efforts, and for revealing all this. And what a massive disappointment to hear it hasn't worked out. It's unbelievable that some promoters have not been interested, just unbelievable. Do they have ANY nose for business whatsoever? Sadly, I think you're right - 'doomed' is the right word...