O Livestream, Where Art Thou?

A couple weeks back, after the quite excellent Broken Arrow livestream, and leading into the genre-defining Western States broadcast, I wandered around TrailCon in search for some answers and some insight into this whole live-streaming business. How is this still relatively new thing in our sport, which already has become a standard to be demanded for, affecting our growing trail running events landscape? And who’s actually footing the bill? I set off asking lots of questions, meeting some folks I hoped would know this stuff, and I got some answers. There are still a lot of loose threads here. This is, as they say, a developing story.

Of course, I am not just wearing my ECC hat here, Rock Candy’s Beast of Big Creek is just a couple of weeks away and I’ve been sitting on this damn livestream challenge, and the multitude of question around it for months now. How do you pull off a livestream for a trail event? As North American’s only stop on the Skyrunner World Series circuit, Beast would surely deserve to have one, right? But where should the damn money for it come from? And further: Are livestreams for short distance races deep in the woods without cell coverage even worth producing?

During TrailCon happy hour one evening I chatted with a couple friends of mine who volunteers on the Mountain Outpost team. They mentioned that there was more to this Broken Arrow stream than meets the eye. This juicy nugget of information took me on a fact-finding mission that occupied my time at TrailCon – I do love a good mystery. How did this all one come together and who are the players behind it all?

This mission I was on led me to chat with some folks (on and off the record) to learn some insights in how the Golden Trail World Series is produced. Broken Arrow used to be a Golden Trail Series stop, after all. I am told Greg Vollet was in attendance for the weekend, so were folks from Warner Bros Discovery. They apparently weren’t too happy that Broken Arrow had a livestream – Quebec Mega Trail the Golden Trail Series fall back event after BA signed on with ACG did not have a livestream this past weekend. A French broadcasting team was in town producing the livestream for Broken Arrow, including eBikers and the full shindig. And of course folks from UTMB were present for the entirety of the Broken Arrow – TrailCon – Western States timeframe. I also chatted with folks from Nike/ACG – who were pleased as punch to hear that the livestream for Broken Arrow, which was announced pretty last minute seemed like a success. They promised me an interview at some point in the future. We shall see what comes from it.

I reached out to my contacts at UTMB wanting to learn about their approach to livestreams for their World Series events. I ended up chatting – without a recording device – with Antoine Aubour, the marketing, communication & media director, who later that week earned his silver buckle at his Western States debut in an impressive time of 22:09:59.

Before we get into everything I learned in my conversations – and again, some of it will be very fragmented and colored by my general feeling around livestreams – I wanted to take a moment to chat about what livestreams are and have become for our sport.

There’s a history in our sport that connects these long and seemingly mad adventure runs in wild places with an almost poetic and creative element of story telling. Outdoor sports have always relied on a heroic or tragic, sometimes both, retelling of ones adventure and experience. Trail running as a newer sport rose in prominence in the age of podcasts, YouTube videos and Instagram stories. Folks used to not hear about some crazy race results until someone shared the story on a podcast. Things were different then.

My personal history with race directing goes back to the very simple joy I felt running my first trail races. Inspired by these experiences I began to pay attention to the details and the way all the pieces were put together to produce a successful trail race. In the same way I taught myself web coding by looking at the source code of early HMTL-driven websites in the early 2000s, I became a race director by being a good observer who liked to design and manage events for the community. But, I vividly remembered a time when website source code became too complex, Flash (rest in peace), Javascript and other complex server technology now runs most websites and one can’t just easily make sense of the various elements that keep a website together. As an event organizer this is how livestreams feel like to me. Marking a course with some ribbons, designing a bib and registering your race on Ultrasignup are easy steps in comparison to the incredible complex – and expensive beast – that is a good livestream.

There’s the question of cost, the infrastructure investment, the diversion of volunteer labor – the ROI. And then there’s the big question of what type of event even pulls a large enough audience to a Youtube feed to make all this worth the effort. Folks tout ‘record numbers’, but what number is good enough to justify the investment?

Long, like really long events – Cocodona is the prime example here – shine on livestreams due to the outlandish nature of the endeavor. A 250 mile run is an incredible story in itself – even to folks who aren’t into trail running. Spectators are being pulled in to the phenomena because it’s mid-week (during work hours, not during the weekend where one has their own long run planned). And in some ways this experience of being able to log on and get a brief update for days at a time, at all hours of the day and night, evokes the comparison of these marathon eSport events. Watching a Twitch stream where someone builds some massive Minecraft world feels comforting and gives folks a sense of belonging in our fast paced, ever changing world. But could the Cocodona livestream be justified if Aravaipa Running wouldn’t own Mountain Outpost and this is truly an in-house production and marketing expense?

Of course, not every livestream has to be a super-ultra event. Western States and UTMB attract folks to watch because of the elite athletes on camera. Even shorter races like Zegama and Mont-Blanc Marathon have established themselves on the livestream calendar, but to me, they don’t have the same attraction. It feels like an entirely different spectator experience to sit down and watch a 2-6hr event on a Saturday, vs. a multi-day one I can click into every now and then when I need a break from work.

Back to me wandering the village at TrailCon. Ahead of my travels to Tahoe I had watched the Broken Arrow Ascent livestream and I noticed something: This was a livestream on US soil – at neither a UTMB or GTWS event – that was clearly different than anything Mountain Outpost is currently producing. For one, it was hosted on the Nike Youtube channel and not on MO’s. My understanding is though that MO is the only US-based livestream broadcasting entity. Maybe there are some events managers dabbling with steady cams, but I don’t believe anyone has been able to pull off a trail livestream experience in the US that didn’t contract MO for help. When chatting with some folks about this observation I was told that it was the UTMB team that came over, including the eBikers, the full production team. ACG had pulled out all the stops. This led me to reach out to my contacts at UTMB to learn more.

In my conversation with UTMB’s Antoine Aubour later that week I learned that UTMB itself does NOT have its own broadcasting team and did NOT produce the Broken Arrow stream. Even UTMB’s livestreams are outsourced to a couple of French companies with the know-how and the equipment.

UTMB sees livestream for our sport very much as a tool to grow it overall. The more people who hear about trail running the more folks inevitably hear about UTMB and begin their journey to collect stones in their hope to race in Chamonix one year.

A few years ago during my chat on Singletrack with UTMB CEO Frédéric Lénart he mentioned a formula conduct their business by: the cost of a bib to a runner is supposed to cover the race expenditures. The sponsorship dollars are meant to grow the organization. When I asked Antoine how UTMB looks at funding these costly livestreams he added to this perspective Frédéric mentioned, that the costs for these are supposed to come from the local tourism regions. A third leg of possible revenue if you will. This is how UTMB determines what races on their World Series get a livestream = any tourism region that is willing to foot the bill for it. The region gets coverage, beautiful area shots, mentions of towns, valleys, destinations to visit and spend money at. And depending on the size of the event and how many races an event has, this cost – according to Antoine – is in the 5 to 6 figure range. That’s in EURO, so it’s a lot of money for a livestream. But it’s also a reasonable one if you think about it. Given that most of their events have multiple distances of races and UTMB so far hasn’t just favored the most popular distance and only broadcasted that one. If a UTMB World Series event gets a livestream all the distances are usually covered. UTMB doesn’t take that cost for this production out of the bibs. They see the livestreams as a benefit to the region where the race is held and ask these stakeholders to pay for it.

This setup leads to the much bemoaned, but obvious pain point for fans which is that several Western States Golden Ticket events are currently not being served by a livestream. Antoine reiterated to me that UTMB is fully aware of this challenge and they are trying to come up with a good solution – hopefully for next year. The easiest of course would be for HOKA to just pay up. But I suppose the question of the cost is the issue here. Is UTMB putting their foot down and saying for the good of the larger runner experience that if there’s a livestream at a UTMB event all distances need to be covered? And is that ballooning the cost beyond of what HOKA is willing to pay? Antoine promised me that they very much are working on a solution for this. Hopefully this will be sorted.

In my research since, I also learned that of the two French livestream operators one of them – Outdoor Sport Live – is going to what it sounds like serious business restructuring, bordering on bankruptcy. So clearly this live-streaming business isn’t a gold mine.

You realize I brushed over the cost figures of these livestreams by suggesting that they are reasonable. Of course, when you consider the UTMB Finals week in Chamonix, all the races and their entire production, one can justify this can go into the millions of Euros. But, beyond a tourism rich region, hosting an event with thousands of runners and eyeballs, who can justify this type of expenditure as part of the events budget? Western States and Hardrock rely heavily on volunteers, which in turns balloons the in-kind contribution to an event. Who else can afford this? Currently livestreams in the US are still largely managed or solicited by the race organization. At Broken Arrow, I believe the decision was made to spend money, and really spend money, on a top notch livestream in lieu of what ACG had done at Gorge where a lot of additional dollars were spend on a campground hosting influencers. ACG footed the bill for it and in return got to host the livestream on their Youtube channel.

The livestreams are becoming a crucial branding tool for the races that do offer them. There will be a clear divide between events that can and those that can’t afford them. It’s sexy to have a livestream for your event and there’s a clear advantage if you do invest into one. In the eyes of the fan it creates instant credibility.

To the average runner it might be fun to share the link with your family, but I doubt it will be a make or break decision on what races you sign up for. For elites the livestream is a mixed bag – I am told – and some prefer high quality polished media, photos, and video which they can repeatedly use and share over a livestream that just happens in the moment.

Have these livestreams help grow the sport over the last few years, and might this overall growth in our sport be enough to justify this investment? I sure hope so. Because when I try to run the numbers on all this I get a bit worried. Our sport is young and it the basics of putting on a trail race one can grasp and make sense of it all. Offering a livestream adds a level of complexity that feels outsized to what it currently delivers. Gorge Waterfalls comes to mind as an event that had a livestream one year but couldn’t justify it since. You can call me a worrier, yes. But I am not an old guy on my porch wishing for the golden days to be back. These livestreams do deliver something to the sport. And they do share the sport with the world. Therefore I am glad they exist and I am glad there are people who invest their brains, their vision, and ultimately their money into this thing. That I am 100% here for, even if several big questions remain.