A senior Warner Bros. Discovery executive has defended the company’s pricing of its cycling coverage, but admitted “there is an audience that will not convert” to the company’s subscription.
Speaking to the assembled media at TNT’s Stockley Park studios, Scott Young, Executive Vice President for Production and Creative for WBD Sports Europe, said cycling was “the DNA of Eurosport” and that TNT”s moniker of being “the home of cycling” was “an authentic position for a sports broadcaster to be [in]” citing their investment made in the sport through “rights, the production team, being on site, having the right commentators to talk to, and having the right experts to talk to an audience.”
“We haven’t really left any stone unturned.” Young added.
“There is an audience that will not convert. There are some people who will not convert from a free-to-air viewing point into paid television. And I think you have to sort of accept that there’s an audience out there that will do that. That’s how the BBC exists, between the sport portfolio as well as ITV. There’s also an audience that will watch content either on a free-to-air broadcaster or YouTube and go, ‘I actually want the rest of that story, I want to find out what’s going to happen on that full stage. How do I do that?’ And they do convert. But you have to accept that both can co-exist.”
Young pointed to the roll-out of HBO Max in the UK as being a game-changer with the breadth of entertainment provided elsewhere on the platform justifying the cost and value of the subscription. TNT viewers will have noticed the proliferation of in-programme promotions of other programmes, including football matches and MotoGP, but also big-budget dramas like Game of Thrones and Euphoria. Young later added that 55 percent of people watching cycling were also using the platform to watch football.
“We always signpost what’s going on at the same time. So if you’re watching the Giro, we’ll actually let you know that the FA Cup is on. All the way through [FA Cup Final] day, we go in and out of all the other sports that are on air. Because we want a football fan to also know how great the Giro is. Because again, if we can help the cycling world bring in new fans of sport that didn’t realise that this is a phenomenal sport to watch, maybe there’s a football fan that never thought of it.
“If we can start to convert other fans and we can raise the tide of a cycling audience, then again it brings in more money to the sport, brings in more money to the teams. That would help. So I think it goes both ways: genuine value for a cycling fan – we hope cycling fans are starting to see that. And the opportunity to get other sports fans interested and become fans of cycling.”
At the time of writing, an annual basic subscription to TNT Sports will cost £25.99 a month for the first 12 months, then £30.99 thereafter. Combined with HBO Max, a subscription starts at £27.99 a month for the first year, then increases to £36.98. The subscription cost is a dramatic increase from January 2025, when a Discovery+ subscription would cost £6.99 a month for access to Eurosport’s portfolio. The now defunct GCN+ app also cost a similar price before the service closed and the GCN brand was sold back to its original owners.
But last February, Warner Bros. Discovery announced they were closing Eurosport in the UK, incorporating the broadcaster’s rights portfolio into TNT Sports, which includes Champions League football.
That announcement came after news broke in September 2024 that ITV would stop broadcasting the Tour de France after the 2025 edition, with Eurosport, then TNT Sports, becoming the exclusive broadcaster of the race. Asked by road.cc if the Eurosport and Discovery+ offering was too cheap in hindsight, Young said “they were very different businesses.”
“I think the sports industry is evolving. It’s evolving in how linear and streaming, the free-to-air and subscription businesses are evolving. The customer journey, the patience of a younger viewer versus the patience of an older viewer in linear television and social media. We’re in a very fragmented, rapidly changing industry right now.
“Without being flippant, what was in the past can’t be really measured against what we’ve currently got today, because all of those elements are rapidly changing. And what we’re seeing in viewing habits is quite a lot of movement between sports, quite rapidly.”
Asked about the removal of the ad-free stream ahead of last year’s Tour de France, replaced by a multi-camera feed option supplemented with race data, Young agreed that the economics of running an ad-free stream identical to the TV broadcast ‘didn’t stack up’, saying “as a commercial sports broadcaster, an ad-free product doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Despite the price increases and investment into their subscription cycling coverage, Young insisted that a free-to-air product would exist in some form, but would not be drawn into the details, whilst hinting an announcement would be made in the coming weeks. TNT are also under pressure to ensure the British Grand Depart of both the men’s and women’s Tour de France in 2027 is broadcast on free-to-air.
> Loss of ITV Tour de France coverage “a shame” before UK Grand Départ, says TNT Sports pundit
“I think you need to have a free-to-air product. And there will be a free-to-air product. We can’t talk about it today. But we’re not going to not have any part of the Tour not on free-to-air.” Young said.
“As a subscription broadcaster, we have relationships with free-to-air partners across nearly everything that we do. For the Olympics, we’ve worked very closely with BBC. ITV was a partner in rugby in what we do and also MotoGP. We also have our own free-to-view channels, such as Quest. So there’s lots of different ways to connect to an audience beyond the paywall.
“Companies like us and Sky invest in sport. And that’s why sports like the Premier League have been going since day one behind a paywall. So there’s clearly an audience in this market that accepts to pay for sport. And if you pay for your TV licence, you’re effectively paying for sport. So $170 a month [sic] or something like that. And effectively, there is your subscription fee for the BBC.”
A standard TV License is £180 a year per household, or £15 a month.
“Sport in this market generally sits behind a paywall one way or the other. We need to have a relationship with free-to-air to do exactly that. For us to continue to have the value coming in through the subscription so we can invest in sport and have a free-to-air partner so that a certain amount of that content is also accessible to people who choose not to subscribe and maybe watch the entire 21 stages but get to see enough of it for free.”
36 thoughts on ““We want football fans to know how great the Giro is”: TNT Sports boss defends channel’s cycling pricing as “genuine value” – and pledges future free-to-air Tour de France coverage”
Charging over £30 a month to watch cycling is outrageous, and they know it. Given the number of channels and subscription options, it would be entirely possible to have a ‘cycling only’ subscription where cycling fans do not have to cross-subsidise the much more expensive football rights they’ve signed up to.
They’re breaking sport and far from enhancing the product, they’re limiting the audience to those who can afford it, which given rising rates of childhood obesity and sedentary activity, is a shameful practice.
To hear them try and defend this is awful.
Absolutely, & to suggest loads of football fans will start watching cycling is marketing BS. Eurosport provided all the stuff he mentions but at quarter the cost. Tosser
Absolutely. From reading football fans’ comments on BBC Sport HYS and conversations at work, my impression is that a lot of them have limited or no interest in most other sports.
I had TNT for a while on another platform but it eventually ended. I counted 61 sports available 4 of which were cycling in different forms. Of the remaining 57 there were one or two that i may have watched once in a blue moon. Surely it cannot be beyond them to structure a subscription package ti accommodate their users.
For instance say £6.99 a month and you get to choose 5 sports.
Despite what they say I’m sure few of the people who watch archery for example are not interested in watching football or cycling or drift racing (whatever that may be)
My wife’s a tennis fan and subscribes to the ATP service which has all matches with points apart from grand slams.
£90 a year.
Something similar for cycling would be great
@lerrup I subscribe to MotoGP’s service. Every race, in every class, every practice session, recall of last 15 years and longer broadcasts. €120 a year. I can get the same for Superbikes. There is no such option for cycling. So instead we have the biggest ripoff in sporting history foisted on us. Great value my 4r$e
That sounds exactly what we want, but for pushbikes!
“The prison of cycling”
That’s terrible – they’ve substituted the turbo for the treadwheel?
I’ve just started a 1 month subscription to TNT/HBOMax at £30.99 (no way would I fork out for a 12 month subscription) to see if it’s worth it. It all leaves a pretty bad taste when you discover 4 x 3m ad breaks an hour, though it seemed that ad breaks yesterday (day 1 of my subscription) stopped in the closing 40 minutes or so of the Giro stage.
I don’t think £30.99 a month is good value, especially when you get adverts on top. I may keep the sub going long enough for the TdF, but not long term.
I have zero interest in other sports. I’ve got zero interest in HBOMax programming.
@Grumpy Bob I may be wrong, but can’t you watch without adverts via Max streams? I’ve certainly been able to, but my TNT is not coming via official channels, so I don’t know if I’m accessing something that is region specific (and thus not visible in the UK).
@squired Nope, ad-free lasted about three months I think, then they simply added the same ad-breaks as the Broadcast channel.
Call me cynical, but they waited until they had a load of subscribers and then shafted them
Again.
“we’re not going to not have any part of the Tour not on free-to-air.”
It’s for communication skills like that that this man gets paid the big bucks.
@Paul J There is no way I’m going to pay someone to talk like that!
@Backladder There’s no way I’m not going to not pay someone to not talk like that.
It’s just another word salad from a tv exec trying to justify gouging the U.K. cycling viewers out of more cash. If their pricing policy is justifiable why don’t they charge for Eurosport on the continent? I’ve no interest in watching football of any description, and you can add all the other sports to that. It’s no wonder some people go down the “dodgy stick” route to getting cheaper tv these days.
The reality for TNT Sports going forward is that their mainstream offering is diminishing markedly next year. This may affect its ability to hold the premium pricing. While it may not matter to those that just want to follow cycling, the loss of UEFA football rights from the 27-28 season will make a big difference for most of their sports subscribers.
@Sniffer I’v never yet seen a broadcaster reduce their pricing, if they lose their UEFA rights they will add in some cheap lower league and call it the same value.
I agree with you, but I do think they will lose subscribers and hence revenue. Like it or not, it is football that drives subscribers, justifies pricing and drives revenues. The cyclist TV fan would be better with an offering that had no football…. like Eurosport?
Scott Young can go fuck himself.
@Bob Sprocket 100%, time to find a continental feed that can supply the necessary on free-to-air.
The same bs price gouging that Sky conducts when the greedy b*s at the ECB sold the crown jewels in 2005. I think here they overestimated the value to be extracted from UK cyclists’ brand loyalty to continental racing.
@richliv SBS Australia
I had issues with VPN detection
Very expensive at the side of other entertainment packages. Limited interest in the football coverage, not interested in other HBO stuff. It’s harmful to the sport that there’s hardly any free to air stuff in the UK. You get it in other European countries.
Hate the fact that I have to watch the same old adverts during a race whilst paying a premium subscription.
Very tempting to go back to VPN streaming.
Money-grabbing scumbags.
Cyclists and Cycle racing viewers tend to be one-sport people, much more than other sports.
He’s talking crap, very many folk were very happy paying £7 a month for GCN+, where they could just watch Cycling stuff.
Then parent company Discovery decided to shaft the Cycling community by simply dropping GCN like a hot potato.
Then there’s all this TNT bullshit in a “fast moving sports media landscape”, next thing you know they’re charging you £31/mth for streaming. Ah, OK, at least there’s no ads. Then they started sticking bloody ads in to maximise their pound of flesh too!
No way on earth would I pay these bastards that much, thank God I’m pretty good at negotiating with Virgin and I get TNT included in my package, in reality its only costing me about a tenner a month. And Virgin finally pulled out their finger and I now have access to the HBOmax app as well, so I can watch at home, record, watch away from home on a tablet, and even stream at home on my Virgin TV360 box, which is just as well because the broadcast channel often clips off the front of the programme because they get more revenue from extending the previous programme containing another sport. Home of Cycling, my arse. We just ( yet again) got ripped off by a bunch of monopolising Yanks.
This bloke is utterly deluded and seems to like the taste and smell of what he’s shovelling. Poke your £30+ a month squarely where where you’re talking from.
This bloke is utterly deluded and seems to like the taste and smell of what he’s shovelling. Poke your £30+ a month squarely where you’re talking from.
“genuine value for a cycling fan” my arse. GCN+ was genuine value.
That’s what happens when you spend so much outbidding everyone else and then have exclusive rights. And they have the nerve to still include adverts!
I am one of those who will not be subscribing to TNT in protest. I realise that there is a cost to putting on the coverage but I also remember when we could watch on GCN+ for a nominal amount. I was happy to pay that.
The subsequent edited highlights programs on Discovery+, which I also happy to pay for, were not so much edited as butchered and I suspect the TNT highlights program will be equally as poorly put together.
Yeh f this guy, he knows they are taking the piss.
If I really didnt want to pay 30 quid a month I’d just get a vpn (£20/year) and use a well known streaming site… heard there’s almost zero interuptions…
£30/month for a sport that’s free to watch… I am not interested in the other sports. Football fans would complain about paying for cycling, why should we subsidise football?
I’ve no idea whether it’s good value, as TNT/ Warner Bros have locked irish users out of even subscribing. There is no way to subscribe to the full streaming service, therefore no way of accessing anything that is not live on channels tnt sports 1-4, no on demand, no live streams!
Dear TNT. Get bent, regards
“But we’re not going to not have any part of the Tour not on free-to-air.” That statement with triple-negative wording makes things very clear, thanks.
I pay the NFL so I can watch all of the games, live or on demand, and it only costs US$250 per year. The money involved in the NFL compared to cycling cannot even be shown on the same graph, so why should I pay more to watch cycling than to watch the NFL? The same is true for Formula 1 – I can pay them directly to watch their product live (I don’t because waiting a few hours to see it for free is fine with me). I think the UCI has missed an opportunity here by not owning the broadcast rights themselves. However, ASO and RCS could also choose to offer something direct to consumers, which I would happily pay for.