Tag Archives: NASCAR

“Cutting the Cord” If Only for A Day

CuttingCord

I thought it would be an interesting experiment. I’ve read quite a bit lately about people who have been ditching their cable or satellite companies – “cutting the cord” as it is called – and just going with what can be found on their computer or other streaming services. For the last couple of years, I’ve owned a Roku 3 (a great Christmas gift from my lovely wife) and use it quite frequently, especially during the baseball season. As an experiment, I thought I would give it a day’s trial, just to see if I could “cut the cord” for a simple 24-hour period. You might be surprised about a couple of things that occurred.

It is something that is happening more than you think across the United States and around the world. Estimates are that as many as 10% of U. S. homes are disconnected from traditional cable or satellite service. A 2014 survey by Mike Vorhaus of Frank N. Magid Associates for a trade conference estimated that 59% of U. S. households paid for a subscription video-on-demand (VOD) service and Netflix was 43% of that group. Finally, that same survey from Vorhaus noted that, among 18-34 year olds, television as the primary medium for entertainment was down to only 21%. Two years later, imagine where those numbers are…

My experiment, however, didn’t get off to a great start. First of all, getting up in the morning and turning on the television was distinctly out. As I prepared my son’s lunch for school, I absentmindedly hit the television in the kitchen for CNN. Just as quickly, I shut it off as I reminded myself what today’s experiment was to be about. After I returned home, it was fortunate that I had some work to do and a doctor’s appointment because I wasn’t concerned about what was either on the television or what I was missing from the news. This was good and bad, in my opinion.

Being able to get your work done – especially for someone like myself who works from home – takes a great deal of discipline. Sure, part of the reason we do it is for the flexibility of the situation (my wife and I also save a great deal on child care), but to be able to look at what you have to complete from a work status and be able to achieve those goals while sitting in your abode is something that all people enjoy. The down side is that, yes, we do work from home so we can have a few extra niceties, such as the television on in the background; I especially like CNN because it isn’t something that you have to concentrate heavily on and, in the cases of “BREAKING NEWS,” it allows you to keep on top of what’s going on in the world.

After the doctor’s appointment, I tried to use one of the new features from CNN, CNNGo, which brings their live broadcast to your computer screen. As I halfway listened to the news that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was “absolutely, positively NOT” going to be the GOP’s savior at their convention in Cleveland (sure, Paul…just like you “DIDN’T WANT” the Speakership), it suddenly cut off and I brought up the window. Sure enough, I reached a situation that many do when they try to break away from their cable service.

To be able to access CNNGo (and, as I was to find out later with my son, to be able to access Disney Junior), you had to have an active cable service account. While CNNGo asked for several of the prominent carriers in the business – names such as Charter, Xfinity, DISH Network and others – they didn’t come up with mine:  Time Warner Cable. As such, I couldn’t WATCH CNNGo on my computer – and my son could not watch Disney Junior through the Roku 3 later in the day – because the companies cannot come to a financial agreement so that CNNGo or Disney Junior can be offered on the computer or Roku (you can, however, access them through the Time Warner app that is available through the Roku…figure that one out). This is one of the reasons that pisses off many with the whole “cutting the cord” thing; in reality, you’re not cutting the cord because, at the minimum, you have to at least have minimal cable service to be allowed access to certain channels, whether it is on the computer or through such a streaming device as a Roku.

Roku4After this revelation, the next problem arose as to the “break away” from the cable company. I sat back and watched, through Poker Central, some of the action from the Global Poker League on the Roku 3 during the afternoon and got a bit restless. Taking a look around, there were very few free streaming channels that you could find to actually watch any type of substantive programming (PBS is good for this and free, but fun isn’t the first thing you think of with PBS). To be able to have any selection to be able to choose from, you had to have access to something like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video or Hulu Plus, each of which charge a monthly fee for access.

These three are the “power brokers” in the new streaming world (“streaming” being whether you watch on your cellphone, your computer or through a device like the Roku) and could have a seismic impact on the shape of the television world in the future. They have already had an impact on programming, beginning to offer their own scripted television shows that have garnered critical acclaim (at the expense of the traditional television networks). But would people actually move to a piecemeal system like this over the traditional cable system?

Some studies suggest that the bundled channel system that cable companies use actually save customers money rather than cost them more, and there’s some evidence to suggest that they may be right. If your cable company offers a basic cable package for $20 per month (and that’s about as base as it gets in many areas, pretty much offering the local channels and a few other stations like the Weather Channel, CNN, ESPN and others), that is normally what people will watch; where people get irritated is when they have 300 channels and nothing is on. With the streaming outlets, you pay somewhere along the lines of $9 a month for Netflix or Hulu (Amazon Prime is $99 per year), but you might have to pay $4.99 for this station to get access over your streaming device and another $4.99 to access another station…it begins to mount up if you have several access points.

Then there is the factor of live sports. Pretty much every sports league has some sort of live package where you can watch every game from the league (except the National Football League; at this time, the NFL Sunday Ticket package is still the domain of DirecTV, although you can pay to be able to watch, on a tape-delayed basis, the NFL games the next day). These packages can range in cost up to $129…if you put that together for baseball, basketball, hockey and hell, let’s say the NFL comes around and does it too, it’s over $500 per year. That’s not counting any NCAA collegiate games, NASCAR, Formula 1, Indy Car, Major League Soccer, Premier League…you might be getting my point by now.

ESPN Plaza - Bristol CT

Then there’s the monolith known as ESPN. Losing money left and right nowadays (as much due to the competition from outlets like Fox Sports, the CBS Sports Network, the NBC Sports Network and insane fees to the sports leagues for broadcasting rights), ESPN has been considering taking the route of Netflix into an “a la carte” service. According to a 2015 article from The Motley Fool, 40% of people would be willing to pay $10 per month for a “Netflix” version of ESPN. The problem is, the Fool states, that ESPN would need at least $15 per month from subscribers AT THIS TIME to maintain its current standard of performance revenues. This isn’t even looking into the future, when the marketplace is further crowded and the bidding wars for rights fees for athletic events gets even more bloodthirsty.

By the time the Yankees game against the Toronto Blue Jays ended tonight on the Roku, it was time to end the “cut the cord” experiment. I had proved I could do it – there’s enough out there and there is the capability to still watch what the television networks provide, if you’re willing to wait in some cases – for at least a day, but any longer might be a stretch. Perhaps in a few years, when the streaming networks have become more like the cable companies and are actually offering “channel packages” and the cable companies have gone truly “a la carte” to allow their customers to choose ONLY the channels they want, then it would be good to try it again. Right now, I’ll dance between the two worlds quite happily – and enjoy them both immensely.

Goin’ South: Pick For the Next NASCAR Champion and Why NASCAR’s Popularity Died

Irwin Tools Night Race

After a week like the one the world has been having, everyone just needs to step off this weekend and let their minds dwell on less testy matters. The start of college basketball season has been a nice salve for me as it is always interesting to watch the next crop of multi-million dollar NBA pros ply their trade…I mean, play for the honor of the school they are attending. Add in the NFL, the NBA and NCAA college football and the plate is pretty full.

I happened to glance at the calendar and realized this weekend is “Championship Weekend” for NASCAR, the venerable stock car racing body in the United States. On Sunday, four men (and we will get to details on them in a moment) – four-time champion Jeff Gordon, defending champion Kevin Harrick, “wild child” Kyle Busch and “steady Eddie” Martin Truex, Jr. – will be eligible to win the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship in the final race of the “Chase for the Sprint Cup (oddly enough, also its final race…a new sponsor takes over in 2016).” Usually I would have been all over this – who doesn’t like a good stock car race? – but, as I have grown older (and NASCAR has made mistakes), it isn’t a priority to me anymore.

One of the problems with NASCAR is that the season lasts WAY too long. Beginning at the start of February with preparations for the Daytona 500, NASCAR only takes about three weeks off between then and almost the end of November, when they conduct the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway in Florida. That’s nine months of week-in, week-out events and they all can’t be “edge of your seat” entertainment. There’s more times than not that the product put on the stage is more a solution for insomnia than bringing somebody back to life.

Secondly, there is this manufactured “Chase for the Cup” as a method of determining a champion. About ten years ago, NASCAR thought they needed to add some drama to their method for determining a champion. Some years a driver would win so much that, by the end of the season, said driver had already locked up the championship and made the final race of the season a snooze fest, something that didn’t set well with NASCAR brass from a fan perspective as well as a television (advertisers) perspective.

To counteract this, NASCAR came up with the “Chase.” Using a variety of different point qualifying methods over the years, essentially after 26 races (leaving the final 10 as a “playoffs”) the top ten racers would be separated from the field and deemed the “only” drivers who could win the Sprint Cup. This “playoff” system has been derided by many old school fans of the sport but can be given credit for drawing some eyes towards the battle for the championship over the years (usually after some big crash has caused a fight between the drivers while in the pits).

Thirdly, if you haven’t seen a race on television lately, the reason is that it is harder to find than a virgin in the infield at Talladega. With the current television contract (split between the Fox Television Network and its Fox Sports 1 cable outlet and NBC and their cable side, NBCSN), there are at least four different networks you’d have to search over to find the race. If you don’t have the proper cable package, you might not get NBCSN or Fox Sports 1; that means you’re going to miss some races that have been shuffled off of the major network to these cable sister stations.

Finally, have you looked at attendance at the tracks over the past couple of years? There is hardly anyone in the stands for some of the biggest events on the schedule. It is almost expected that some areas like Kansas, Kentucky or even California might not be able to fill the grandstands (due to location or just plain boring racing), but when such popular racetracks as Talladega and Bristol have empty seats, something is going wrong.

The problems facing NASCAR aren’t exclusive to that sport alone, however (OK, having races somewhere in Kansas might be, but we’ll let that alone for now). Much like the National Football League, with the advent of HDTV and internet services, fans are more likely to stay at home – where they can see pretty much everything going on rather than just when the race screams past them for the umpteenth time – and kick back in their recliner to watch the event. Count in cheaper beverages, not having to pay for a ticket (a family of four could spend as much as $400 to attend one race) and not having to deal with pre- and post-race traffic, it isn’t hard to see why attendance is down and, perhaps, even viewership (due to the television contracts and the different stations).

OK, if you’ve reached this far, you’re probably interested in a prediction on who will win the Ford 400 (look, you have to have a bigger name for your Championship Event than this!) on Sunday. Let’s break the four contenders down in their “Pros and Cons.”

Jeff Gordon

PROS:  This Sunday is the final race in what will eventually be a Hall of Fame career for Gordon. The four-time NASCAR champion would like to go out on top with a fifth championship and there is a sentimentality factor for the fans to send him out that way.

CONS:  For the past few years (he won his last NASCAR championship in 2001), Gordon has been hanging on the edge of the game. Sure, he gets a win once in a while and, for the most part, always was in the Chase for the Cup, but he never was a serious contender. If Gordon was to win the championship, the screams of “FIX!!!” would be heard at racetracks from Fontana to New Hampshire.

Kevin Harvick

PROS:  The defending champion of the series, a likeable character nicknamed “Happy” (once a tongue-in-cheek ode to his temperamental outbursts), Harvick would demonstrate that his 2014 title wasn’t a fluke. He’s been at or near the top of the leaderboard all season long and has won three races over the course of the season.

CONS:  While leagues may like dynasties, NASCAR fans don’t (just ask six-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson, who won five of them in a row). Harvick also rubs some people the wrong way with his attitude towards other drivers, especially when he uses the same tactics. Thoughts are if he hadn’t caused a huge wreck at the end of the November Talladega race, he wouldn’t even have made it to the Round of Eight in the “Chase.”

Kyle Busch

PROS:  One of the most winning drivers in NASCAR and its different racing series over the past decade. Huge talent that has never been this close to claiming a championship. Has a racing pedigree with his brother, Kurt, also winning a NASCAR Cup title. Won four times over the course of the season.

CONS:  Bratty, arrogant, pompous – these are a few of the kinder adjectives used to describe Busch. All those wins hasn’t exactly bought him a great deal of respect from the fans, either. Missed a great deal of the season after a crash at Daytona in February broke his leg; he needed a waiver from NASCAR (and a bit of hard work on his part) to even make the “Chase” to begin with.

Martin Truex, Jr.

PROS:  The epitome of hard work. A single car team from outside the South (the Furniture Row team Truex drives for is based in Denver, CO), Truex has been able to bring this team to the precipice of the goal of any competitor – being a champion. One of the most popular drivers with both fans and fellow drivers in the garage…don’t think that anyone would begrudge him winning the title.

CONS:  Who? Truex isn’t exactly the fan-favorite like Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and he nor his team have the history of being among the best in stock car racing, a field that is dominated by three or four large teams for the most part (racing teams operated by Hendricks, Gibbs and Childress, for the most part). If he were to win the title and not win on Sunday (the champion will be determined by who finishes the highest amongst these four men in the race), his one win would be the least by a champion since Matt Kenseth in 2003.

I’ll probably tune in for the final 20 laps or so of the race on Sunday, but I certainly won’t be glued to it as I might have been in the past. While the story of Gordon is nice, the story of the “underdog” Truex is a better story, so I’ll be rooting for him. Hey, it isn’t like they won’t be starting the next season in a month or so anyway.