I think it’s a duty for anyone who is involved in sport horse industry that’s producing an event to livestream/video record it and share it freely because this is how the world learns in 2018.
The videos from the 2017 University of Kentucky Ag Equine Summit (held on the 26th April 2017) provided some very interesting discussions about the role and opportunity to use technology. It stuns me that my viewing of the video doubled the viewing count on youtube (I was the second person to watch the following video of the ‘Racing and Breeding Careers’ panel that was posted over a year ago!):
“(38min) every viewpoint is important if we’ve got to grow this business. So if a young person is 17 years old and he wants to watch a horse race, and let’s say he loves horse racing. he’s crazy about it. Well he wants to download the Xpressbet.com or the Twinspires.com app well he can’t because he’s too young. He’s not able to. So okay he’s gone because we can’t get him in. Now let’s say he’s 19, so he’s old enough so he wants to download the ExpressBet but he lives in Georgia, or Texas or Alaska or North Carolina. And so there are 38 states that allow you to watch a Horse Race and so there are 12 states where you can’t and in which you’re immediately eliminating everyone under 18 years old. You’re immediately eliminating everyone that’s in the wrong location even if they’re international you can’t watch a US horse race. These barriers are self inflicted wounds. Now let’s say you have TVG and you’re 17 again and if you’re not our cable subscriber or your mum and dad don’t have a satellite dish and then they didn’t subscribe to TVG then you’re SOL as my mother would call it. So we’re losing our fan base because we’ve got ridiculous barriers and then we’re going to go and look at Roberts Communications. So Roberts have a monopoly on distribution of the content and they think they own the content and the delivery of everything and they’ve got all the exclusives and all that. So if I want to watch a replay on a race, let’s say I want to watch Secretariat’s maiden race win from 1972 there’s no core central database aggregating all these replays because the media rights to all this content is all being controlled by everybody. Churchill Downs want their little fiefdom and Roberts doesn’t want anyone to watch their replays with them paying. Well let’s all join up and knock all these walls down and let’s get over it… …most other sports don’t make it so difficult to watch… …how can you grow a sport that’s supposedly in a negative spiral if you’re going to charge new people to watch a product that they don’t know anything about?… …That’s what’s killing our sport”.
Click here to watch Part 1 (Equine Health & Nutrition Careers & Skills) and here for Part 3 (Communications, Marketing and Nonprofit Development).
HorseTech Conference 