RaceFansTV.com was
launched in late May 2010 after 6 months of development by a team of motorsport
enthusiasts and technology professionals. The company was founded by Chuck Ehredt, an American
living in Barcelona, Spain – but his team includes
a large number of high-profile individuals and companies working from multiple
countries that each bring strategic value to the initiative.
The idea for RaceFansTV
germinated in 2009 when Chuck
Ehredt realized that many race series had accumulated a great
deal of historical racing videos that would have been on TV at one time or
another, but in recent years had been collecting dust in various archives. He
also knew that motorsport enthusiasts are happy to watch racing all week long
and not just when the big F1, MotoGP, or NASCAR race is live on Sundays. Unfortunately
these enthusiasts had very little access to television programming that
included much racing during the week and no access to historical races (which
often times are more interesting than current races because of the people
involved, the cars, or the safety standards of the day).
With that observation in
mind, he started to develop a business plan to create a company that would license
historical racing video programs from content owners and share revenues with
them, while creating a website that could be the
destination on the Internet for motorsports enthusiasts who wanted to watch
such programming while participating in a community, reviewing the latest news,
and helping keep a wiki of historical racing information up-to-date. The team
also felt that if they could attract a large audience of motorsport
enthusiasts, they would also be able to fund the operations via advertising –
since over $2 billion is spent each year on sponsorships and related advertising.
RaceFansTV currently has
11 active channels including channels dedicated to Sports Car, Touring Car,
Rally & Off-Road, Stock Car, Racing Documentaries, Powerboat, Open Wheel, Drag
Racing, Sprint Car Racing, and several others. This allows enthusiasts to
watch races of greatest interest to them at any time of the day, 7 days per
week. Each channel streams full racing programs 24 hours per day just like a
TV channel. However, with the flexibility of the Internet, visitors can
restart a video that has already begun, or come back later to watch the end of
a program if they get interrupted.
RaceFansTV offers all of
its content to visitors and members for free. However, people can subscribe
for about $5 per month in order to watch the videos in high quality, watch
videos when it is more convenient to them, watch videos in full-screen, and
enjoy videos with less advertising. By November 2010, Subscribers will be able
to watch RaceFansTV videos on their hand-held devices and wide screen TVs.
The team at RaceFansTV
believes that the volume of videos (mostly clips) on the Internet is already
overwhelming for consumers to find things of interest – and getting worse
every day. For this reason, RaceFansTV is positioning itself as the primary ´go-to´
destination for consumers to find great motorsport content, rather than have to
weed through thousands of websites to find bits and pieces of interesting
content among a bunch of low interest information. With this goal in mind,
RaceFansTV expects to start broadcasting some races live, and work more closely
with the most popular racing series to help them gain exposure for their events
and simplify the lives of their fans by providing all their video content in
one place.
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