The New York Racing Association plans to add signals from top-tier tracks to its daily racing broadcasts on networks associated with FOX and is exploring the creation of a broadcast channel that would provide round-the clock coverage of racing, officials for NYRA said on Wednesday.
The two-pronged effort has been rapidly formulated over the past two days in the wake of reports on Friday that FanDuelTV will wind down its studio operations by the end of this year and cease operations at the end of 2027. FanDuelTV, formerly known as TVG, has been a constant presence in the racing industry for the past 25 years.
The FanDuel decision has generated intense discussion among racing officials over the past five days, and those discussions have accelerated since Monday, according to multiple racing officials who spoke with Daily Racing Form earlier this week. Several of those officials had said that they had already reached out to NYRA or were planning to speak with NYRA about an expansion of the offerings on its FOX productions.
“I’m sure we are going to have discussions with FOX,” said one executive at a prominent racing company who was granted anonymity to discuss talks with competitors. “We were on TVG. So where do we go now?”
Tony Allevato, NYRA’s chief revenue officer and a former producer at TVG, said on Wednesday that FOX had offered NYRA its support on bolstering its existing television broadcasts with signals from top-tier tracks while simultaneously forming a streaming option that would be styled on the NFL’s RedZone, which hops from game to game on Sundays.
Allevato stressed that the planning is in its preliminary stages but that NYRA intended to move forward quickly.
“We’re looking at coming up with something that is easily accessible that would allow customers to watch and receive content from multiple racetracks,” said Allevato on Wednesday. “We’re not looking to replicate what we do with ‘America’s Day at the Races’ or ‘Saratoga Live’ or do exactly what FanDuel TV was doing, but looking at a new product that would be available at no cost to fans.”
Earlier in the week, many racing officials had expressed concern about FanDuelTV’s pending demise, but many also said that the broadcast and streaming markets have changed so dramatically in the past several years that the channel may have run its course.
Several of those officials have also noted that ADWs have offered livestreams of races for decades, available for free to any customer, and that it would be natural for the industry to consolidate those signals into a single streaming studio production.
“We’re always so critical of ourselves, and we obviously do a lot of stuff wrong, and we have a lot of things we have to fix,” said another official at a company that provides signals to tracks. “But streaming is one area that we have done right for two decades. And more and more [the television universe] is moving toward streaming.”
Already, Keeneland Racecourse in Lexington, Ky., has reached an agreement with FOX and NYRA to broadcast two stakes races on its April 11 card on FS1. The track had previously had an exclusive arrangement with TVG.
For its upcoming spring meet, Keeneland will be producing a 30-minute preview show each racing day that is available on half a dozen streaming sites and locally on the broadcast network CW Lexington. The April 3 Bluegrass Stakes will be broadcast on NBCSN and NBC’s streaming service, Peacock, while all of the races from the spring meet will be broadcast on FanDuelTV.
“If you consider racing and its audience, we obviously want to get a younger demographic interested, but it’s also important to make sure our existing core customers can watch,” said Gabby Gaudet, Keeneland's director of communications. “Keeneland’s mission is to support and grow racing, and looking toward the future, we're willing to collaborate with others to fulfill that mission."
NYRA and FOX first partnered on racing broadcasts in 2016 with the launch of “Saratoga Live,” which eventually broadcast 80 hours of live racing from Saratoga Racecourse on Fox Sports One. Three years later, the companies launched “America’s Day at the Races,” which provided year-round coverage from NYRA’s other two tracks, Belmont and Aqueduct.
FOX itself acquired the broadcast rights to the Belmont Stakes in 2022, effective in 2023. This year, according to NYRA, the company’s broadcast channels will air more than 1,000 hours of racing, with 25 of those hours on its flagship FOX national network.
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“Fox has been a great partner with NYRA, and every conversation we have had with them has been them asking how can we do more for horse racing, how can we get more from the top tier?” Allevato said earlier this week.
While Allevato said that NYRA does not yet have contracts with any tracks for coverage in its broadcast programs, he said on Wednesday that the existing programs would continue to stress “quality over quantity.” That would seem to indicate that the programs will have limited slots for other tracks, but the back-up would be the streaming show.
Officials contacted by Daily Racing Form earlier this week said they supported the concept of a streaming show, and, surprisingly, many predicted that the entire industry would be willing to provide their signals to the service. One official cited the so-called “exclusivity wars” in 2007 and 2008, when TVG and the major ADW operators insisted for a time on signing exclusive contracts with tracks that ended up limiting the availability of signals on all the outlets.
“We did that,” said one official. “And we didn’t like it. The fans didn’t like it. No one liked it. It’s too disruptive to the fan and it doesn’t make money.”
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