That’s actually kind of genius; I was about to say… that’s a great way to anonymize … basically everyone; and might be a bit of the “future” in some places where privatized stuff is such a big deal (ie: want to go watch a live sport but you aren’t allowed to film me type situations [yes I get it’s silly but just stating it as a potential issue soon])
I know the NFL tracks a bonkers amount of information with players this day and age as well, and could do the same (and sometimes do in some things).
Between the growth of AI and the way photogrammetry and splat tracking works these days… this is kind of fun.
I totally see this backfiring though in so many cases, where companies (like NBC for example), will do everything to shut down people trying to do this on the backend to get around video rights etc.
This would be less of an issue if broadcasting rights were less of a monopoly globally than they are.
I was watching a youtuber I have followed for a long time now that does old racing sims, and he made the comment about why he doesn’t stream / record a game he recently put out due to a community overhaul; and the comment he made was “F1 wasn’t on TV back in the late 90s / early 2000s because of whoever had the broadcast rights [I think it was Speedvision]; since we didn’t have [Speedvision] in our cable package, it was not in my life and back then there was no internet, so it simply did not exist, so I grew up with what we could watch.”
Knowing the hurdles US folks have to jump through to watch pro cycling, I could see someone trying to circumnavigate broadcast rights by turning every TdF stage into Zwift-looking avatars. Don’t know if it would work, but there’s someone thinking about it right now. (Who was it…years ago, some cycling site was giving daily Giro updates but didn’t have rights to the clips, so they were reenacting everything with toys and giving voiceovers. It was brilliant.)
It won’t be long before things like that “get complicated.”
Another example I ran across earlier this week was AI Voiceovers of some F1 stuff (which is funny because I’m not an F1 person but, I got clickbaited into watching it); which was basically AI voiceovers of modern stuff with Murray Walker.
Those unaware, Murray Walker passed a few years ago and was a commentator for F1 for… kinda like forever; like 30+ years??
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some similar stuff like that from an AI Phil Liggett.
Can you imagine watching a series on Zwift with an AI trained Phil Liggett voiceover? Kinda fun… totally can’t be legal, but… bit off topic here, just thought it was an interesting thing to mention.
As an on-topic comment:
I think there are far less Zwift Ride owners in this world than some folks on this thread suspect; based on two teammates who recently received theirs (as in the past week or two), and asking what their serial was, it was far lower of a number than even I initially imagined.
It’s probably also to do with having access to the broadcast on devices people have at hand.
People can’t always be in front of a traditional TV.
I didn’t watch it to be honest - I’m a bit strange in that I prefer to be doing sports myself instead of watching others do them. Hence I don’t watch pro cycling.
RE: the toy reenactment, here you go: classic Orica-Greenedge Backstage Pass days. (EDIT: Although not the best video of it, they had more but I can’t find them.)
Between laps at the pool, I caught Zwift hitting 37k users at 13:03 EST, a notable decline from its 2021 peak of 49k users. Nonetheless, Zwift participation remains 3x higher than pre-2020, before the indoor cycling bandwagon took off.
So a simple significance analysis is that since 2021, peak zwift is down 3 times, and up 1 time. The odds of there being no more than 1 upward shift out of 4 = (4+1)/2^4 = 32%. Of course I didn’t pick 2021 at random: I picked it because I saw a peak there. So I should probably exclude 2021. Then the odds become (3+1)/2^3 = 50%. So there’s no significance in this trend, statistically. But on the other hand it’s very unlikely there’s any growth.
Statistical fans out there might be tempted to apply Poisson statistics for significance analysis but this would ignore that other factors contribute to variation, like weather, the attractiveness of the day’s events, what’s on television, etc. So this would be misleading.
I believe the 2021 peak is valid because it’s not random or solely attributable to Zwift; it aligns with trends in cycling and indoor training overall. Take a look at Peloton revenue:
Interesting it’s so close! Also it’s interesting the number scales fairly closely with he peloton revenue data. In particular, “peak Zwift” is not a great statistic – you’d rather see peak users in a week, for example (counting all users in the week, not just at any given time), especially to capture users outside of Europe.
Maybe it will increase more since Fulgaz has been taken over by Rouvy.
The DCrainmaker article isn’t nice reading, feel bad all the staff who were let go. I stopped my subscription immediately. It was a good thing and for me complemented Zwift. The routes that weren’t on Zwift usually were on Fulgaz in nice detail.
Peak is down nearly 5k from last year which is an 8.7% drop.
If Zwift do have (as they claim) over 1 million accounts then it could be as high as 87,000 accounts.
Obviously it lies somewhere in between.
But if you said they had 250,000 paying accounts (1/4 of claimed accounts) the it would still be 21,750 paying accounts gone?
And if they are losing that many accounts YoY, it might be time to stop sponsoring events, teams, and classification jerseys, and start putting that money into better product development and/or reduce the pricing.
