Backyard Ultra 2024 Livestream

The 2024 World Championships for the Backyard Ultra is currently happening in Laz’s backyard, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee. As I type this the world record is being broken in this insane and quirky race format. The folks left running are from another planet and I am not even going to post how much they’ve achieved as they are still out there grinding the miles.

What I want to point out is that a livestream is now increasingly is part of the expectation for these well-known events and are all done in the same way. I’m not even going to criticize the quality and realities of YouTube livestream limitations. What I don’t get is that embedding a livestream on your official race website is super easy but hardly anyone does this. Livestreams are mainly there to help lift the visibility of the event and therefore its sponsors. Why not build a dedicated homepage where the livestream during the event lives and pop the latest live feed in there every time YouTube forces you to restart. Ain’t that hard, creates huge brand value for yourself and your sponsors. And fans can easily share your race website rather than “search on Youtube and hope you find the current feed’.

Or is nowadays everyone using the Youtube app, rather than the browser for this and therefore websites are moot? Maybe in the evening, on your iPad or on your TV, but during the day, while working one has a browser window open to watch, right? Am I alone on this?