UKC

The IFSC has released a statement back tracking on the decision to outsource the coverage of World Cups to American company FloSports. The move received widespread criticism after it was revealed there would be a high subscription fee to view the competitions. This decision comes after the IFSC athletes' commission called for competing climbers to withdraw cooperation with the livestream media - a decision thoroughly welcome by the climbing community.Read more

In reply to UKC News:

Ha - what a result.

:redface: for the IFSC...

In reply to UKC News:

Bet that cost them to take the contract away from them.

In reply to UKC News:

Hats off to the IFSC for listening to athletes and the climbing community, admitting a mistake, and changing course. Are you watching IOC, NFL, FIFA...?

Activism work, people. Stand up to injustice and demand change. We need folks to do this for more important issues than streaming climbing vids...

In reply to Richard Wilson:


Read the article - contract hadn't been signed yet.

In reply to UKC News:

Great news but the announcement still strikes me as incredibly terse, as were the previous ones. Maybe a fuller explanation will be released later but from what I've seen that doesn't seem likely.

The poor English, 'It was made a mistake', makes me wonder how many people were involved with this. There are at least 3 or 4 members on the board whose native language is English. Presumably none of them had read this before it went out.

This leads to the question who does the IFSC actually refer to in this context? If it's not the athletes, not the Federations, not IFSC officials and seemingly not even the executive board who does this 'we' comprise?

In reply to stp:

I agree. It makes sense if you read it in an Italian accent.

Marco's starting to Make Bernie Ecclestone look like a team player

My guess is that he agreed to tear up the contract, once it was obvious that neither IFSC nor FloSports had anything to gain from it. "Never signed" would have been the most face-saving exit strategy for all concerned.

In reply to The Wise Old Elf:

There can still be incurred costs, I regularly see terms & conditions which include clauses if you cancel or fail to sign off after spending the teams time to build your proposal/develop the requirements then you pay for that time at a set consultancy rate.

FLO I think will be relieved to be out of the picture, up until a week ago few had heard of them, in the past week all anyone has been told is that they are the lowest of the low. Not a great starting point in which to build a customer base from even with their financial aspirations of what people would pay for their product being laughable.

In reply to The Wise Old Elf:


WOW

That is even crazier considering they were just about to film / broadcast the first comp a few days later.

The TV company must be crazy to have agreed to it without them signing up.

In reply to UKC News:

Apparently they're releasing a press release tomorrow. It will be interesting to see what they say.

In reply to john arran:

That sounds plausible. Though the 'never signed' is at least admission that they lied earlier by claiming they had already signed, which is pretty poor show, especially if there's no apology/explanation.

In reply to Durbs:

Well, at least they used the word "apologize" - usually these things are dressed up in newspeak.

In reply to stp:
I think you can forgive them for trying to create a PR buzz over what they perceived was a good deal at the time, a letter of intent or other similar could have been in place.

Ultimately this is eclipsed by the alleged lack of tender process so they were protecting the IFSC from a rubbish deal, the subcontractor service didn't sound appropriate (£££/per month) for the audience, lack of any stakeholder engagement (no one was consulted), rule changes to fit with the subcontractor's requirements (4 min rule).

Sitting with my vendor management hat on for a moment this sounds like a team who lack the necessary experience and given the IFSC probably doesn't have much money and is based on voluntary work to keep it going is understandable although a very public error of judgement.

On the flipside, FLO will have been exposed to a huge amount of bad press over this which they didn't need or were expecting, hopefully in the future FLO or similar will come along with a price we all happy to pay (knowing some will go to the IFSC) that promotes climbing and reaches new audiences without excluding people.

Flo press release is out on Friday, however all reference to IFSC has been deleted from their twitter and webpages.

In reply to alx:

Ignore me about Flo & twitter, stuff is still there at the very bottom

While it was obviously a daft decision, credit to the IFSC:

- They changed their minds
- They did it quickly enough to avoid any material damage
- They issued a decent and friendly apology
- They appear to have said they'll involve people in future

What's missing now is a rollback on the daft 4m rule back to the 4m+ rule - any word on this?

In reply to duchessofmalfi:

Nope, they still have their head in the stuffed in the sand over that one.