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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.