TrainingPeaks buys IndieVelo

My wife solely uses ERG mode on Zwift… Coach pushes to TP, TP pushes to Zwift. She will stop paying Zwift subscription as she is already a TP premium subscriber. Everything will be done in the TP environment going forward.

For UK customers, TP for the year is ÂŁ69 with the right discount code (even at full price it is half that of Zwift).

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Zwift has been focusing a lot on racers recently.
I am a gamer.
If Zwift manages to increase the gamification aspect of the game I’ll stay on Zwift, if not I’ll go over to TP next winter.

I’m glad the IV dev found a path for his passion project. Hopefully they are very smart about how they staff and integrate IV into the company. I’ve seen so many passion projects get purchased then stagnate. Such as say…. Zwiftpower, wahoo’s cycling app acquisition which they were going to deeply invest in, but did not, etc.

Taking on new devs for IV could actually slow it down if they are not careful. Hopefully they give him a designer to help reskin it.

It seems like a great thing for TP and great value add for anyone using TP.

I honestly don’t see the value in this for TP at this stage. TP don’t seem to invest very much in the TP platform. It hasn’t come in very far over the last few years. Are they going to invest significantly in IV to make it a Zwift competitor?.. I’d say very doubtful so hard to see it being anything other than a poor relation to Zwift. Very difficult to see what TP see as the value proposition here. Guess time will tell.

Imagine a user who subscribes to TrainingPeaks, runs those workouts in Zwift, and has never heard of indieVelo. Those people are out there. They set something up, they pay no attention to the social stuff, they just do what they have always done. Now they get approached by TP saying that what they have always been doing could be done without paying Zwift a dime. Maybe you tell them about everything else Zwift has to offer (which I enjoy very much BTW) and they say they are looking at Netflix and paying $20/mo to run a workout which they can now do for no additional payment.

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Unexciting to me. It would have been more thrilling if TrainerRoad had acquired platforms like IV, RGT, or similar ones to integrate their training programs and workouts within a virtual world -many people do run TR and Zwift simultaneal. I thought Wahoo was going to integrate System and RGT, but they just canned it.

I’ve uninstalled the IV version I was testing—just not interested in their current direction, especially with the emphasis on TP. For $20 a month, Zwift with all cartoonish looking I dislike provides a superior virtual experience to execute training; pricing isn’t the concern here.

Good for the customer, but not for TP. Take me, I have TP premium and Zwift. Do I stick with TP premium and ditch Zwift. Unless TP charge more, then they’ve had no additional benefit. If they charge more and don’t unbundle IV, I cancel so they lose
The only way they benefit is if they can charge more AND I stick with them. That means IV has to massively improve, which looking how slowly they develop TP is highly unlikely. So my point is, I just don’t see how TP benefit from this unless people leave Zwift and adopt TP for the lower price. People can already get IV for free and I don’t see them leaving Zwift en masse, so I just don’t see this working out.

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Long time TP customer here since 2014. Indievelo offers nothing much for me at the moment unless they can start building real virtual worlds with the courses I want, imagine they did a virtual Alpe d’huez…

Otherwise my cycling training apps are just Zwift, Fulgaz and a multi-license PerfPro Studio (for proper erg workouts). indievelo doesn’t have a place for me at the moment.

I don’t see TrainingPeaks changing anything much for now.

There will be angry IV users who are furious they have to pay more than nothing at all…

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Only the stupid ones who thought that program development and support cost nothing. It was always obvious that iV would become chargeable when it dropped out of beta mode.

Even with all of the existing TP function, it’ll still be cheaper than Zwift.

I guess everyone who wants a free app will move to MyWash instead?

They created this with the premise that elite cyclists want stuff that cycling software aimed at ‘casual cyclists’ don’t - “Developers designed all the existing platforms for casual riding, not competitive events, so don’t fully cater to what elite athletes want and need.” is the quote I read on cycling news.

I don’t really think it makes any sense. But it’s all the nonsense surrounding getting people on trainers sweating at the olympic games (why? why not just join the grown ups cycling at the velodrome? That’s a hugely popular sport now, well funded etc. logic would suggest the only reason you wouldn’t is either if the grown ups won’t let you race with them or you’re worried about falling off and scraping your knee) - and the premise being that skill should determine who wins races.

Sounds good until you figure that sitting on a trainer removes all the skill from cycling. I watched Norcal’s latest video of one of his buddies racing, and it’s scary, visceral content. Flying around inches from kerbs at high speeds. That’s cycle racing. Every time I see one of the people sweating on a trainer on my youtube feed I’d have to stifle laughter if someone suggested that is in any way comparable to cycle racing. Or that the latter will ever be taken seriously by anyone.

The guy is clearly smart but none of it makes any sense to me. Perhaps he’s too smart to see the obvious or perhaps I’m missing something.

Although I guess they have break dancing at the olympics. Maybe all you need is a big enough wheelbarrow full of money. It’s interesting given all of this guys credentials, stated premise and work that the UCI are using a different product for their official one. When I read the article with Gilbert being quoted saying things like "“We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to define the future of a sport, starting from a blank sheet of paper” - and it seems that mywhoosh is the official app.

Does that mean mywhoosh defined the future better than indievelo did, or that the UCI criteria for best platform isn’t any of that stuff after all?

Anyway it seems like it’s 3 companies competing to throw money at the UCI to invent something that already exists in a significantly better format. And I guess what we got out of that was 2 products that, for at a time at least, are or were free. Whoop de doop. Although I still picked zwift (as much for pragmatic reasons, to use the others I’d have to somehow virtualise bluetooth, not impossible but zwift’s companion app does that)

Bottom line, the stated goals and premise of indievelo doesn’t seem destined to steal a big market share (if there is a big market share for people who want to cycle indoors) because the world isn’t full of elite cyclists who want to sit on a trainer at the olympics. If zwift plans and ideas include making people who want to cycle indoors have the features and content to sate that interest then zwift should be the better software.

Well, in a way it’s true when you look at platforms putting in auto-braking to keep people stuck behind others and powerups/powerdowns (burrito).

Also when you look at the way the workouts creation tool in Zwift, it’s frustrating to create workouts versus other tools that are more directly aimed at that.

The other thing on Zwift is that “fast is fun” is the motto so some users say it’s fine for people to adjust their weight down 25kg for a fast lap of ADZ when they want.

Yes, that’s fun for them, but I bet it wouldn’t be so fun for you if you did a nice 45min lap and I decided to make myself 30kg and did 35min lap. Because you’d know that’s most likely blatantly wrong and not possible.

The racing crowd is also pushing hard to have better pace dynamics (which Indievelo has, even wind simulation) and they want functionality to catch weight-doping and egregious power outputs that wreck racing. I don’t race in Zwift but I agree with those demands.

I need the trainer software and indoor trainers to maintain/build my fitness and strength, without it I just don’t have time to go out every day of the week on a real bike and everything would go away. With it, I’m fine to pack my bike up and go ride overseas up mountains with decent ability. Because I still ride outside on the weekends I’m still fine to descend okay and my bunch riding skills are still sharp, but then I used to ride on the track on fixed gear so learned the craft there.

Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what they’re doing.

DC Rainmakers take seemed to be that this is more about the platform finding a home where it’s going to be more about a product for everyone to cycle around in - i.e rather than their initial idea that they’re not competing with zwift, now they are.

My guess is the UCI just went for the one who paid the most.

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According to TP wesite indieVelo will be free until 2025 March

there is another option - MyWhoosh it’s AD on UAE team shirt & UCI’s choice

but my area blocked & need VPN to run mywhoosh, so i have never play mywhoosh

Has anyone played MyWhoosh and found it good enough?

IV (as it is called) has a great race set-up. The main problem is that you race against two or three people and 22 bots. Only in chat can you tell who is real.

IV has horrible graphics, which Tp can fix. George never intended to work on graphics as he was focused soley on riding and racing. I also found that not having Strava segments is disappointing. Rouvy has a few misplaced segments but they were not created by Rouvy. Being able to compare yourself with others or chase a kom/qom really adds a lot to the overall experience.

I also greatly enjoy the arches in Zwift. Graphics count a lot in my training. Wish them luck, but once it is improved, it won’t be free anymore either.

My Whoosh is pretty good now, I have been using it a little over the summer to do some training, and now getting deeper into autumn more so, just lack of people is the main problem. I used my free 25km on zwift the other day for one of the tour of whatever it was, zwift crashed at the start, done an update even though I clicked do later or whatever, My whoosh is going to be a very good platform, this time last year on my old out of date laptop it crashed frequently, in the last 3 months, I’ve used zwift once, it’s crashed once, used my-whoosh many times, 1 crash when my lap top was doing an update, I may go back to zwift in winter, main reason more people to ride with, for training, training programmes My Whoosh is better. The £18 a month for zwift means I won’t be using it as much as I did in the past.

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