UTMB’s Broadcasting Partnerships

A couple of weeks ago UTMB posted their broadcasting schedule, and more importantly their partner networks for broadcasting the 2026 World Series season livestreams.

Matt Walsh on Trailmix has the rundown of what was announced and some comments. I promised him a reply, so here we are.

By and large the comments online were largely negative, mainly because UTMB announced a new partner: FloTrack. FloTrack doesn’t have a great reputation which can be summarized with: bad product, expensive subscription service.

One platform Matt sees missing, and the solution to UTMB’s broadcasting conundrum is Youtube.

Meanwhile, the obvious route sits in plain sight: Use YouTube as your free livestream host with ads and commentary, then use UTMB Live as your paywalled option with graphical overlays, no ads and LiveTrail data integration. People who have already paid for a UTMB race in the past get access, otherwise you pay a season pass for the livestream. UTMB gets customer data and another income stream, and the far significant reach of YouTube.

Since its inception YouTube has operated with somewhat split personality offering two distinct solutions:

• In the early days when storage and bandwidth were expensive Youtube offered free media storage and distribution. This still exists and is used by organizations who want to take advantage of the generous service offering but without engaging with the social network side of platform.
• In recent years Youtube has become social network offering an ad revenue sharing, commenting, and algorithmic discovery.

UTMB is using the technical side of Youtube (I would assume). For folks who are looking for full length streams, and commenting (just not YouTube comments) UTMB Live has existed, isn’t its going anywhere, and is free to the user and free from third party ad insertion.

But this, to me, isn’t a matter about looking for a technical solution. What UTMB is after is partnerships. And that’s the piece that Matt overlooked here. Youtube isn’t a partner, they are just a service provider and you can do so – if you wish to work the system, game their algorithms, and play in their garden, so to speak. YouTube doesn’t know that UTMB exists. There are way too many hours of video being uploaded every minute, shared, and watched that a livestream of an ultra race isn’t generating a blip on their radar.

What Matt is ignoring is that Youtube isn’t a SASS product, but a social network. You the “content creator” control very little. Case in point: at last week’s Chuckanut livestream from Mountain Outpost several times as podium finishers were arriving at the finish the feed was interrupted with auto-inserted, unstoppable commercial breaks destroying that finish line feel. Discoverability for long streams that have to be broken up into several separate ‘shows’ is an unsolved hassle that adds to the confusion. Black Canyon, with an annual much watched livestream from US largest ultra running livestream provider: Mountain Outpst has a link on their website to the 2024 livestream recording, still. It’s 2026.

While Youtube might appear to be a great solution for the “Youtube Generation” – i.E. folks who are already regularly on YouTube, are logged into their accounts, and have their feed tailored to their viewing habits, YouTube won’t help new folks discover the sport. And yes, if you regularly hang out on Youtube, and I don’t fault you for that, it makes sense that your wish is that UTMB should just come to you and stream there.

Ultra racing coverage is a challenging broadcasting product, there Matt and I are in agreement, and it’s easy to see that current versions aren’t suited for traditional broadcasting schedules. Having said this, we often compare trail running coverage to other sports.

This is not football, or tennis, or even Formula 1. It is a 20-hour narrative scattered across mountains, forests, and tarpaulin aid stations.

But how long is a golf Masters broadcast? Or a cricket game?

I get the fear that some might have, that if you partner with an outsider, especially someone with a large business interest, their influence into our sport might force the sport to change. Things can get out of our control quickly and these different/new ideas might not be up to our standards. Right now I am okay with that tension. Not because I am not acknowledging the potential that someone who doesn’t seem to understand what makes our sport special couldn’t ruin it for all of us. But the problem I see with keeping everything “in house” is that we get complacent and aren’t innovating. That “good is good enough” and there are plenty of folks who feel that way right now. Our current livestream broadcasts aren’t great products yet. There’s A LOT missing. And of course that ‘LOT’ is cash. It’s easy to get volunteers to sit at a mic and ramble for a few hours, but back of the house production is time consuming and costly. Is it possible that we can develop all this talent and expertise “in house”, homegrown from our current selection of aging elite athletes and podcasters? Maybe. But I reckon UTMB has always believed that the product they are creating needs partnerships, not just fans who are given a chance to prove themselves learning something new and sitting in front of a mic. This is not meant to put anyone down but acknowledging that experience from the outside can be a breath of fresh air, and offer you a chance to level up, and bring new people into the fold, that’s not a bad thing.

Addendum: I have not finished listing to the latest episode of Trail Talk where friend of ECC Aaron Shimmons chats with the great Ian Corless yet, but I am struck at how influential sky running used to be (in Europe, maybe?) and that it used to – according to Ian – represent how trail running was presented to the world. The races, the places, the athletes, the visuals. So trail running wasn’t always about long ultras that are hard to capture on screen. This seems to be a recent development, one driven by the Americanization of the sport, and the rise of UTMB adopting the 100M format as their king distance. So of course, this is UTMB’s problem to solve – they are pushing the demand for the ultra distance. And their current strategy is working with partners, rather than just throwing it all on YouTube and letting the algorithm solve the rest. I don’t mind that.