“Feels like cycling coverage is about to go back into the dark ages”: Cycling fans blast “absolute disgrace and disaster” as Eurosport Player set to shut down after Tour de France

Cycling fans in parts of Europe, the US, and Australia were greeted today
with the news they’ve been dreading since the demise of the GCN+ app late last year, after it was revealed today that Eurosport’s Premium
subscription service is set to close down the day after the Tour de France ends, with subscribers told to instead sign up for Discovery+ and HBO Max – and pay a significantly larger sum to watch live cycling.

According to an email sent to a Eurosport Premium subscriber today, the Eurosport Player is to be discontinued from 22 July, the day after the
Tour’s Nice finale, but before the Olympic Games and the Tour de France Femmes.

Instead, viewers in certain parts of Europe, such as Belgium and the Netherlands, have been recommended to subscribe to streaming platform Max, while fans in the UK, Ireland, Germany, and Italy are told to find their cycling on Discovery+.

As noted at the time of GCN+’s demise last year, the end of cycling’s first, extremely popular dedicated streaming app marked part of Warner
Bros. Discovery’s plans to consolidate all its content – from all of its sports to documentaries, films, and reality series – on one platform.

This week’s news is further evidence of that shift, it seems, and means for many cycling fans having to pay a higher price for content they don’t actually want – with one European viewer quoting €15 a month for a HBO subscription with the sport add-on package – when, just 12 months ago, they could subscribe to an app with only wall-to-wall cycling coverage (of
course, all of that coverage still exists on Discovery and HBO, it’s just mixed in with everything else).

Which hasn’t gone down too well with armchair viewers who predicted that Discovery’s ‘content consolidation’ would not work in the favour of cycling
fans, and who now fear a return to the circa 2010 era of limited live
coverage for reasonable prices and dodgy streams.

(Although it must be noted that for some viewers, especially in the UK, the price doesn’t change much, if it all, if they change from Eurosport to Discovery+. For the moment, anyway.)

“This is an absolute disgrace and a disaster for every cycling fan.
Terrible decision,” said the fan behind the popular Cycling Out of Context account.

“Terrible. It’s already impossible to get the Eurosport coverage here in Australia without a UK/Euro credit card. The sport is just going to lose
people permanently because of this,” added Carlos.

“Feels like cycling is about to go back into the dark ages in terms of coverage. This sucks a whole bunch. Why must broadcasters do this to all sports?” added former cycling journo and Jayco press officer Sadhbh O’Shea.

“We’ll look back and talk about the cycling season of ‘22 and ‘23 like old
hippies talk about the summer of love... Cycling nirvana did exist and it
was GCN+ and Eurosport Player,” wrote cycling cartoon guy Rich Mitch.

“Big Cycling has fully eaten itself and is now just picking at the bones of what it was.”

Even current pros were getting involved in the debate.

“Let the return to Tiz commence,” said Larry Warbasse, referring to the online streaming site favoured by Americans in the pre-GCN days.

And the answer?

“VPN and watch every race live on either Sporza or RAI,” said Philip Malcolm.

<https://road.cc/content/news/cycling-live-blog-21-june-2024-308991#live-blog-item-58761>

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