Streaming Cycling in UK - Discovery+ prices!

Page may contain affiliate links. Please see terms for details.

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
so if enough of us do, maybe they may reconsider in the months ahead. 🤔
Where "enough" is 80% of Eurosport subscribers. If more than that upgrade to the £370+/year sub, Warner Bros are making more money (assuming slightly lower cost from only having to serve a fifth as many mugs). And each two who continue with the basic £48/year sub is more income than one old £84/year sub, which won't be as painful as a cancellation.

Will four fifths of the mugs who let themselves be herded this far down the path to paywalling really turn back now and hold out for it to be at least as cheap as before? Let's see!
 

Alex321

Guru
Location
South Wales
Where "enough" is 80% of Eurosport subscribers. If more than that upgrade to the £370+/year sub, Warner Bros are making more money (assuming slightly lower cost from only having to serve a fifth as many mugs). And each two who continue with the basic £48/year sub is more income than one old £84/year sub, which won't be as painful as a cancellation.

Will four fifths of the mugs who let themselves be herded this far down the path to paywalling really turn back now and hold out for it to be at least as cheap as before? Let's see!

I think the jump from £6.99 to £30.99 is so big that they might just cancel.

Holding out for at least as cheap as before, probably not - if they had doubled the price a lot would have stayed, but more than quadrupling it is just crazy.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
I think the jump from £6.99 to £30.99 is so big that they might just cancel.

Holding out for at least as cheap as before, probably not - if they had doubled the price a lot would have stayed, but more than quadrupling it is just crazy.
Don't forget, there's "£16/month for 7 months" being offered to some cancellers, which both reduces the loss for WB and lets them analyse cancellations before maybe offering something between £16 and £31 per month, maximising their profitability.

And then there's the dodgy marketplaces for sharing subscriptions because D+ currently allows 5 devices.

All making that 80% cancellation target harder to reach.
 

andyoxon

Legendary Member
Normally I cancel D+ from Sept - Jan. Our D+ std pass was active as we'd been watching Aus Open tennis, so have cancelled, but taken out the £15.49 for 7mths TNT sports deal. £6.99 for tennis (AO & Fr O etc) and all cycling was a good deal. I won't be paying £30.99 - even with the bonus of having England cricket included, but for the next 7 months at least the £16 has 'added value' for me. In early September, I'm out. May be tempted to stump up one off £31 for July 26 - TdF.
 
Last edited:

Dogtrousers

Kilometre nibbler
mugs who let themselves be herded this far down the path to paywalling

Not really helpful use of language.

What we "mugs" have done is purchased the only product available. The alternative is ... nothing, well apart from Chris Horner, Lanterne Rouge etc al on YouTube. (Or maybe for the technically adventurous polyglots among us rigging up some way of picking up German TV)

I suppose another alternative would be for us to have collectively boycotted Eurosport and not watched any cycling at all outside of the GTs (and had to suffer Millar) in the vague hope of influencing the market. Yeah, right, and maybe we could have joined hands and sung "we shall overcome" while we were at it.
 
Last edited:

Alex321

Guru
Location
South Wales
Don't forget, there's "£16/month for 7 months" being offered to some cancellers, which both reduces the loss for WB and lets them analyse cancellations before maybe offering something between £16 and £31 per month, maximising their profitability.

Yes, I'm sure some will go for that - I think it is probably on offer to all. As well as showing it as I cancelled, I also then got an email with it in this morning.

And yes, at just over double now, it will be attractive to quite a few. Then another doubling in 7 months, you might be right that they won't lose 80% of subscribers.
 

bobdaspider

Active Member
Having been used to paying £6.99 a month to watch each of the Grand Tours - maybe, with hindsight, the amount was very cheap... Put another way, would you pay £1 a day to watch a Grand Tour? When thinking of the percentage price hike (343%), then it seems crazy, but when thinking of being asked to pay £1 a day, then it doesn't seem so bad - does it? I guess it depends on how much you want to watch the Grand Tours... 🤔
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
Having been used to paying £6.99 a month to watch each of the Grand Tours - maybe, with hindsight, the amount was very cheap... Put another way, would you pay £1 a day to watch a Grand Tour? When thinking of the percentage price hike (343%), then it seems crazy, but when thinking of being asked to pay £1 a day, then it doesn't seem so bad - does it? I guess it depends on how much you want to watch the Grand Tours... 🤔
But the thing is, you're already paying, aren't you? Each time you shop at Lidl or Decathlon, buy certain handwash or airline tickets, save in certain banks, and so on. Not to mention your taxes, if you live somewhere that hosts a race. Now the hostage-taker is demanding more ransom, plus they'll keep the wider public out of more, so those sponsorships will be worth less, so even less will go to the teams and riders and even more to ASO and large other organisers.

How far in the hole do you want to put the sport before you stop paying Warner Bros?
 
Quest and D Max sometimes have live coverage of the GTs. The Welsh channel S4C also does, if you don't live in Wales you can probably find it somewhere on Freeview or your sat box, and definitely online.

Commentary mostly in Welsh but you can still follow what's going on.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
Quest and D Max sometimes have live coverage of the GTs. The Welsh channel S4C also does, if you don't live in Wales you can probably find it somewhere on Freeview or your sat box, and definitely online.

Commentary mostly in Welsh but you can still follow what's going on.
Giro coverage has been missing from S4C iPlayer in past years, when I've gone looking, after Quest have managed to show Real Polish Border Cops instead of highlights, as they seem to once a race.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
Not really helpful use of language.
I was helpfully telling you all where GCN/Eurosport/D+/WB was heading for 4 years and got replies ranging from "I don't think it'll happen any time soon" (a fair difference of opinion, but wrong as it turns out) to downright rude ridicule, so excuse me not being helpful now! I'm going to say "told you so" and take the mick a bit. Fark all else left to do, really. You're probably beyond help now. Sorry.

Nothing changes for me this year, and next year I lose the best TdF coverage but I still have other ways to watch. I am disappointed about the damage it will do to cycle sport in this country, though. For at least a few years, there will be the Tours of Britain and the National Championships on ITV, if the ToBs survive without ITV advertising them heavily to the Tour de France audience, and the BBC's "anyone remember how to cover this sport?" coverage of the World Championships and maybe RideLondon if it continues...

What we "mugs" have done is purchased the only product available. The alternative is ... nothing, well apart from Chris Horner, Lanterne Rouge etc al on YouTube. (Or maybe for the technically adventurous polyglots among us rigging up some way of picking up German TV)

I suppose another alternative would be for us to have collectively boycotted Eurosport and not watched any cycling at all outside of the GTs (and had to suffer Millar) in the vague hope of influencing the market. Yeah, right, and maybe we could have joined hands and sung "we shall overcome" while we were at it.
Well, what are your choices now? Pay £370+/year to WB for a load of sports you don't want and hope they don't up the price again, agree to pay WB just over half that rate in the hope that they drop the undiscounted price after the TdF, or still end up boycotting and hope that 80% of your fellow subscribers also do, soon enough that WB give up their stranglehold. People willing to ignore that WB were cornering all the rights have left you with a far worse choice now than a few years ago.

The alternative was watching the free-to-air channels when they had coverage (they used to have more... ITV had most of the ASO race highlights and the Vuelta for a couple of years, NBC still put the Tour Down Under highlights this year on CNBC) and letting them know what you liked, filling in the gaps with online video highlights, youtube or otherwise. Instead some on here kept on about how wonderful the Get Cycling Nobbled road to hell was and everyone should buy in and there's no way they'll get all the race coverage rights and then jack up the price. That aged badly.
 

Dogtrousers

Kilometre nibbler
Eurosport came bundled in with my Sky package, that I was subscribing to anyway. As did my Discovery plus sub.

What was I supposed to do?. Not tune in out of some kind of holier than thou protest?

And yes, I probably will be taking them up on their only moderately extortionate 7 month deal.
 
Having been used to paying £6.99 a month to watch each of the Grand Tours - maybe, with hindsight, the amount was very cheap... Put another way, would you pay £1 a day to watch a Grand Tour? When thinking of the percentage price hike (343%), then it seems crazy, but when thinking of being asked to pay £1 a day, then it doesn't seem so bad - does it? I guess it depends on how much you want to watch the Grand Tours... 🤔

Considering the BBC Licence fee is less than £15 a month and for that you get umpteen radio stations, BBC Sounds so thousands of hours of content to download, all the TV stations, websites, news, weather etc etc - twice that amount just for cycling (cos I'm not interested in the rest of the Discovery offerings) just doesn't make sense to me. I coped without the cycling coverage before - I'm sure I'll manage.
 
Top Bottom