Recent global events have prompted track organizers and promoters around the country to take a closer look at online video streaming as not only a stop-gap measure, but a new source of revenue in the long term. But while livestreaming offers benefits to fans and racers alike, the logistical and monetary considerations may have some folks thinking twice before jumping into the fray.

LIVESTREAMING OPPONENT:
WAYNE DELMONTE,
LEBANON VALLEY DRAGWAY
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I think that one of the main issues with livestreaming is that it provides the opportunity for people to not come to your track and be an in-person spectator who might buy from your merchandise booth or your snack shack, and it can negatively affect revenue in that way. 

While it’s convenient to watch from home, those fans aren’t getting the same experience the ones in the stands are. You’re watching the race through someone else’s lens, and if you’re lucky it’s a shot of the starting line, mid-track, and the finish line. You might not see the whole race from start to finish in the way that you would want to, but ultimately you really have no choice in the matter. 

There’s also the intangible elements to consider—the smell of race fuel, the sound, the rumble of the ground during a pass. You can’t replicate those things on a computer, and you also can’t walk through the staging lanes and see what cool cars are there or talk to different racers at the event. You’re watching curated clips of the events that are happening. That might be enough for someone who’s really familiar with the sport and just wants to keep up to date on what’s going on, but if you’re someone who’s just getting into it, you’re missing out on a huge part of the experience. 

There are also some significant financial obstacles that have to be considered. If you don’t spend the money to have a quality livestream with high-end cameras, professional production, and the required Internet bandwidth, you’re asking for problems. You also have to consider the fact that you need crew members who’re dedicated to specific roles in order to make it work—an unmanned live feed camera system probably isn’t going to cut it. 

It also needs to work well right off the bat or you risk tarnishing your track’s reputation. If you’ve got people paying for access to the service and your livestream is terrible, that’s just another way for the track to get a bad review or something like that. Nothing is worse than bad publicity on the Internet—it stays there forever. For us, the costs involved to get it off the ground and make it into a high-quality service would probably turn out to be a losing proposition. 

LIVESTREAMING ADVOCATE:
JIMMY PHELPS,
WEEDSPORT SPEEDWAY
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First and foremost, livestreaming gave tracks the ability to operate in some capacity during the COVID-19 shutdown. We’re all fans of racing, and it provided opportunities that we wouldn’t have otherwise had if there wasn’t a little bit of revenue and fan involvement coming in. And for the race teams, it also allowed them to satisfy their sponsorship agreements on some level. 

For us it was bigger than just trying to get that streaming fee out of a household. It helped to keep things afloat during the pandemic, but on a larger scale it has broadened our fanbase—in the Northeast modified world, we’ve definitely noticed a geographic expansion there. 

A perfect example of that is Max McLaughlin, a North Carolina-based racer who has made a name for himself over the last three or four years up here in Central New York. When he comes out to our track, both our local fans and the ones in North Carolina want to watch him race, and livestreaming gives us the ability to provide that to folks near and far. 

The decision to stream our 2021 events stemmed from the idea that if we had the ability to enhance our reach, it would offer a little more to our partners and sponsors. There is a fanbase of people out there who want to see what’s going on at your track, and that fanbase doesn’t necessarily have the ability to be there otherwise—they might be too far away to make the drive there on a given night, or maybe they want to watch a family member that lives across the country. The world is becoming smaller because of this technology. 

Our fear going into it was that these people were not going to outweigh what we could potentially lose in the grandstand ticket sales, but we’re slowly starting to see that broadening that fanbase has actually improved the bottom line. There are situations where some people just can’t be there, and we’ve created a way for them to still be a part of it. That has proven to outweigh the situations where people could go out to the track but decide to stream it at home instead. 

Fortunately for us, Weedsport Speedway’s owner Al Heinke established an in-house production team alongside the extensive renovations that began here back in 2013. As the property evolved, he was always looking for ways to enhance the entertainment value of the facility, and he decided that we needed a crew of people here that could create some professional, real-time productions to make the “show within the show.” All of the MAVTV features from Weedsport Speedway are done in-house here—we send it to them more or less ready to air. So, since we were already filming and producing our own races anyway, livestreaming wasn’t a big logistical leap for us. 

That said, if tracks want to offer livestreaming, I think it’s important that they put their best foot forward right out of the gate. There are definitely capability needs that need to be addressed in terms of bandwidth and the quality of the production itself. We’ve learned a lot over the course of the past few years with the American Flat Track races and other events that we’ve done—the need for fast, consistent upload speeds was a necessity that we were aware of and had already addressed previously. 

The infrastructure needs to be right; it’s something that any venue considering offering livestreaming services should thoroughly evaluate. Do you want one camera, or do you want six? Do you want in-car footage? That’s where everybody is going to be doing things a little differently, and where stronger efforts are going to really stand out.