Sparkplug #12

I woke up this morning wondering what subject I was going to tackle for this week’s Sparkplug. Earlier this week, I thought I would talk about the National Amateur Motocross Championships at Loretta Lynn’s, since that wonderful event is about to get underway. But this morning, sometime between hitting the snooze button and drying off after the shower, it hit me that I have some thoughts about television coverage of motocross that I want to share.

Television is a very powerful communications medium, probably the most influential tool for reaching a mass audience ever devised. I’m not going to get into the psycho-biological aspects of sitting in front of a screen that’s flashing at a rate undetectable by the naked eye; suffice it to say that there’s a reason TV executives can charge millions of dollars for mere seconds of advertisement time. I will state the reason TV exists as it does: to generate a mass audience for advertisers. That reason is the SOLE reason why motocross has historically had a tough time getting on TV.

Motocross is a niche sport. Even if every American motocross fan that ever existed, dead or alive, were somehow able to watch the same program and get measured by those mysterious Nielsen ratings machines, our viewership numbers would still look puny in comparison to a weekday baseball/basketball/football game. That’s why the only way we can get motocross broadcast is by buying the airtime outright. And even then, it takes a very sympathetic broadcaster/cable channel to carve out the time to sell to us. We’ve all seen what happens then: our shows are likely to get “time-shifted” at will, in order to accommodate programs that have larger audiences.

So, what do we do? Do we figure out a way to make our sport more attractive to a larger audience? Or do we just face reality and deal with it? Here’s my suggestion: we need our own cable channel. A 24-hour channel DEDICATED to motocross. Not “motorcycles”. Not “off-road-style events”. Not “extreme sports”. Just motocross in all it’s forms: supercross, arenacross, freestyle and amateur events. How do we pull it off? Well, it has to be completely viewer funded. That’s right, it’s time for us to come out of our pockets again.

Look at it like this: how much would YOU pay for the complete Supercross “package”, live, non-stop coverage of every supercross event of the year? That’s 16 events, right? Would you pay the same as a good ticket at the event? That’s $30 to $45 per race, and it saves you the other ancillary costs of attending an event (parking fees, overpriced food and drinks, etc.) What if you could get a package deal for the whole year of racing, Supercross, outdoor Nationals and Arenacross… and they throw in LIVE coverage of Loretta Lynn’s to boot? What would THAT be worth to you?

Supercross has experimented with pay-per-view in the past. I think it’s still a viable idea. Just today, over at Racer X Online, a company called MediaZone is offering a clearance deal on some Extreme Sports PPVs. Pay-per-view is one way of dealing with it, but I really think a dedicated cable channel is the way for now. And with the rapid changes underway in Internet broadcasting, pretty soon we’ll be able to do it all online, cutting the cable companies out completely.

What do you think?