From the Editor: Yes, Livestreaming Is Expensive—and Worth It

“If my associate AD saw only the online broadcast of this [national championship regatta], there’s no way he’d approve the expense of our program,” is what the head coach of a top rowing university told me this spring.

He’s right—and that’s an existential threat to our sport.

My daughter got excited about rowing, finally, not through the hours of rowing videos playing in our house over the years but by watching coverage of Olympic sculling on NBC. We can’t wait another four years to excite the next kid.

Everyone, from executive decision-makers to the next kid to try rowing, experiences more through screens increasingly than in person. It’s why Rowing News makes all of our content available now digitally. It’s expensive to do well, even as technology—and the opportunity to do it poorly—get cheaper.

In 2018, informed by experiences at the 2016 Olympic Games and having seen up close professionals work at the 2017 World Rowing Championships, several Rowing News colleagues and I spent significant time, money, and energy looking into what it would take to bring that level of video storytelling to domestic regattas like the IRA. The short answer: a lot.

About $100,000 per day in 2018 dollars was our conclusion, which tracked with what the best-in-class video presentations of Henley Royal Regatta and the World Rowing Championships cost at the time.

Yes, that’s a lot of money—about $125,000 in today’s dollars—but not out of line with what our community chooses to spend on other expenses commonly found at regattas. Two eights and a four cost that much. The SUVs and luxury cars found in the parking lots approach that cost. The four-year cost of attending the private schools and colleges racing at the regatta are multiples of it. Even some head coaches are finally being paid more than that figure.

If borne by the crews at, say, a 50-school, three-day regatta as an added expense, the cost—$7,500 per school—is not an easy sell. So a financial solution is not so simple.

Still greater complexities and experiences inform the current state of live video coverage of our sport, as Madeline Davis Tully explains in her feature “Rowing on the Small Screen.”

Just because it’s hard to do well (just like rowing) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make every effort to do it better. And since important decisions will be made by those who experience the world through screen time, we must.

Both the athletic director who decides which sports get cut and the kid looking for her new sport will do so by looking at their screens, and they need to be shown just how great rowing is.

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