Horseracing on television.

Horseracing on television.

Insight and commentary on the world of thoroughbred horse racing.

Thoughts and opinions about the fascinating sport of thoroughbred horse racing from a racing insider.

Horseracing on television

The landscape of televised horse racing has undergone some major changes over the past year. The Breeders’ Cup broadcast moved from NBC to ESPN and the latter network decided to drop its weekly racing recap show. Now comes word that Churchill Downs and its affiliated tracks, namely the Fair Grounds, Calder and Arlington will be phased out of the TVG lineup.

The Fair Grounds will be shown through the end of their current meeting, Calder through the end of the year. At least some of the Arlington meet that begins in May will be on TVG, but the races from Churchill Downs itself will not be available when the gates open for the spring meeting on the last Saturday in April.

The question that came to my mind first was ‘what about ‘The Works’ show’? Will the week-long series on TVG that shows the final workouts of the Derby and Oaks contenders be produced this year?

There was no mention of my little concern in comments made by the parties from either TVG or Churchill Downs, Inc. If I had to guess, ‘The Works’ will be a thing of the past, at least on TVG. There is no longer any reason for them to promote an event, even the Derby, from a track with which they are no longer partners.

If that is in fact the case it would be a great shame that Derby fans from around the country would no longer have that kind of access.

But chances are we will see the Churchill tracks move over to TVG’s rival HRTV, which has been primarily broadcasting the tracks operated by Magna Entertainment Corp.. The two biggest racetrack owners have already combined forces to operate a horse racing channel in England. In fact, that’s really at the center of the TVG-Churchill divorce; TVG made a deal to make its broadcasts available on the British outlet Attheraces, essentially using Churchill’s content to compete with a Churchill co-owned enterprise. The lawyers and judges are currently trying to figure out if TVG had the right to resell its content in the first place.

So where does this leave TVG? According to The Blood-Horse wagering on the remaining Churchill Downs umbrella tracks accounts for only 13% of TVG’s total handle (and that included Derby Day wagering, which will now be off limits to TVG customers). TVG will keep the under-new-management Hollywood Park on the schedule and will add Monmouth Park (host of this year’s Breeders’ Cup) this summer. Racing from the major New York tracks will also remain on TVG as will Del Mar, presumably. But next winter the TVG cupboard, hardly full without racing from Gulfstream and Santa Anita now, will be almost completely bare with New York and Kentucky winter racing to be the featured fare.

It’s a bit sad, for purely nostalgic reasons, that TVG and Churchill are parting ways. On Demand Services (ODS), the forerunner to TVG, was test marketed in the Louisville area and was broadcast out of a small corner of the Churchill-owned simulcast center Sports Spectrum. I did some work for ODS in the latter days of that experiment and actually signed the channel off the air on Labor Day evening, 1999. TVG opened for business from their Los Angeles studios two days later.

The only video on ODS at the time were the feeds from the racetracks. We would do some voice overs while changing from track to track, clever things like ‘let’s go back to Saratoga for the prices on the fourth race,” or “here’s the post parade from Del Mar, please keep in mind this is on tape delay and there are actually only three minutes left to post.”.

It would get pretty hairy on the weekends with up to seven tracks running. I’d have to tape a lot of races and post parades and try to squeeze them in between the live races. Sometimes I pushed the wrong button on the right machine or the right button on the wrong machine and the races would be lost forever.

I understood the resistance to the TVG format in the early days. ODS was designed to be a gamblers channel - provide the odds, the post parades, the live video for as many races as possible. The early TVG hosts were largely panned not because they were bad (although some were, the infantile Julie Krone comes to mind) but because they were blabbing on and on while providing little to no useful information. TVG has come a long way since then with more and better graphics. And with the internet more prevalent, specific betting information is now only a few clicks away for bettors.

And I think that’s the key moving forward. The future is still the internet and it’s by far the most efficient way to deliver racing content into bettors homes. In the ODS days we would always get complaints from bettors, and owners and trainers too, that we didn’t show a race of interest or did so on a delayed basis. I’m sure that’s still true even today with both TVG and HRTV. I hope whatever Churchill and Magna decide to do that they and TVG will consider getting together to develop a single web-based platform where bettors, fans, owners, breeders and trainers can simply choose to see what they want on their computer screens (or the computer/TV hybrids that are on the way). I know that’s probably too much to ask, but there is really no sense in fighting over TV anymore.

Matt O'Neil has been a racing enthusiast since the mid-1980's. He is a freelance writer and thoroughbred marketing consultant and editor of the breeding journal Owner-Breeder International. Contact Matt O'Neil