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Atom I spent much of last night live-commenting on the opening round of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup, the Sebring 12 Hours. It is also the opening round of the American Le Mans Series.
The race proved very exciting but was difficult to follow. To the organisers' credit, there was an attempt to make the series easier to follow than ever and I've heard the ESPN3.com coverage was excellent, at least for some people. However, only viewers in the USA could watch it that way, for international coverage was on a separate stream on americanlemans.com. This was a good idea, except that it appears that interest in the race was severely underestimated.
The official site's video coverage seriously lagged. By halfway through the second hour, it was three minutes behind the action and the stuttering on the audio was so bad I had to mute it. Thankfully two alternative audio streams were available. Not trusting the one hosted at the same site as the stuttering video, I opted for Radio Le Mans.
Radio Le Mans worked well during the afternoon, being smooth and consistent. Then I went to swimming club just before 6 pm GMT (3 1/2 hours into the race). I wasn't around to see it, but apparently there was a point in the action where the only information source available was Twitter. The video, all audio streams and both live timing systems were all down. The audio was back up and running by the time I was home at 7:30 pm GMT (5 1/2 hours into the race) but from then on everything was quite shaky. I had to reset the commentary four times between that point and the end of the race (something which had been unnecessary prior to going out). Even using Twitter was chancy because some people (including some official sources) were following the race using streams of varying timeliness.
Naturally, this was unsatisfactory to the many people watching. Sidepodcast's hour-by-hour visit recording system (known as Heartbeat) demonstrates this vividly. After steadily increasing in views during the hours between the race starting and 18:00 GMT, there is a sharp fall in viewers in the two hours following, probably due to people getting fed up and leaving. Indeed, by 20:00 GMT, the figures are only about twice as high as for the morning commenting, which is the quietest time of day for the blog. Yes, the figures recovered as the night progressed (though ignore midnight onwards because a second event, the Red Bull Crashed Ice event, was being live-commented there later on) but think how many more viewers would have been there if everything had worked correctly.
This is a very widespread problem in motorsport but rarely is it put in such stark relief. I know it's difficult to cater to the multitudes, especially when you have no idea of the volume of those multitudes (it was the first time ESPN had attempted to provide a visual service to international ALMS supporters and it was only the second race of this level the ALMS had attempted to live-stream internationally). Nonetheless, the message is clear.
Improve reliability and the potential rewards are huge.
Low reliability will carry a heavy price.
Much like endurance racing for the teams themselves, really. Aim for the sorts of reliability the GTC class had. Not those of LMP2*...
* - I do not believe I am offering any spoilers by saying that all 8 GTC cars, even the ones that didn't see the flag, completed more than 70% of the race distance (in other words, enough to be classified had this been an LMS race) and only one of the four LMP2 cars did so.
I followed the ESPN 3 feed most of the day, though I too was out at the time you mentioned. It seemed to be working quite well. We had the Radio Le Mans guys commenting and they were very good, though they waxed on a bit about the video quality (saying it was excellent). Unfortunately, both endurance series in the US run on Saturday, and I usually have to work. Good work by the Orreca team, no doubt.
Not living in the USA, I could not access the ESPN3 feed. By the sound of it, the problems may be to do with the individual feeds rather than the source - if you'd had the sorts of effects in your feed that I'd had in mine, you wouldn't be calling it "working quite well". It is reassuring, however, to know that the American audience which is the primary one for the ALMS, has the best feed. This makes sense and also gives hope that eventually the other problems will get ironed out.
My pet theory on this is that there was underestimation of how many people would be interested, particularly in the international video feed. With insufficient servers and ancillary equipment in use, buffering and failure of the feeds become a danger. If ESPN3 was working basically fine, this would support the theory because different feeds usually live on different servers for stability reasons.
I have no complaints about RLM or the video feed except that they were unreliable. I've heard worse from RLM and the sheer novelty of a complete sportscar race being shown live to UK viewers tended to hide any weaknesses on that side.
Having races on when one is busy is irritating, even if Saturday sportscars prevents overshadowing by Sunday single-seaters.
Finally, you're absolutely right about ORECA. It was brilliant seeing the underdogs with the old car defeat all the new ones
The RLM crew kept saying the ACO had done a good job of equalizing the old and new cars. For Sebring at least, I would have to agree. Before the start most felt the old cars had been restricted too much, but once the race started, the Orreca car and the Audi R15s were right in the thick of it. The emotion of the Orreca team principle and his crew when they won was quite special. Everyone is always excited about a win, but it was obvious it was reall special to this crew, above and beyond the norm.
I can see what you mean. All sorts of cars managed to fight on equal terms and the celebrations at Oreca were a joy to behold. Bravo!