Virtual Spectator's magic carpet slows

By CHRIS BARTON

The news that Virtual Spectator was cancelling its internet coverage of the remaining seven rounds of the World Rally Championship this year was a shock - one that's going to be difficult to recover from.

It's the latest in a string of problems facing the sports animation company, which was saved from mounting debts by a last-minute buyout.

Putting on a brave face, Virtual Spectator says it will be back with a new and improved version of its viewing software for the first round of the rally next year. But you have to wonder whether that's going to do the trick.

Like so many dotcoms, Virtual Spectator faces the great unanswered question of the internet - how the hell do you get users to pay? And like so many that have come and gone before, Virtual Spectator believes it had the magic formula to make the impossible happen.

But at the last America's Cup hardly anyone subscribed to its net coverage. Ditto for other sailing events such as the Volvo Ocean Race. Ditto again for the World Rally. Even the most zealous of sports fans just aren't prepared to pay for sport via the net.

Why? Because everyone expects net content to be free. And because the ardent fan wants an experience as close as possible to being there - to almost taste the salt spray as a yacht's bow breaks a wave, and to almost smell the dust of rally cars as their screaming engines tear up the track.

Sadly, Virtual Spectator despite its name doesn't come close. It's a fantastic analytic tool to describe the action and tell the background story. But for fans who can't be there, that's a third choice after TV - a medium that delivers sports events much better than the net.

So it's no surprise that rally fans have told the company the obvious. They want live, not delayed, tracking of the cars. They want to see the surrounding environment of each special stage, not just a track and a black void all around.

They want news, commentary and sound effects, not just a silent screen. In other words they want it like TV.

For the sports fan, it doesn't really count much that Virtual Spectator's amazing positional data technology can put several rally cars on the track simultaneously. They like it, but they want more.

I experienced this I-want-it-all phenomenon first hand at the last America's Cup while sipping on a chardonnay on a superyacht, on a beautiful day on the Waitemata Harbour.

The racing yachts were out there in the distance looking magnificent and on deck we clustered around two screens - the TV with Peter Montgomery's manic commentary and a Virtual Spectator internet-connected PC giving fantastic animations of who was in the lead.

Interestingly, Australian America's Cup winning skipper John Bertrand was also looking at that screen and talking into a cellphone to give a running commentary to people on shore who were typing it on to his website. At the time he was the head of Quokka Sports, a dotcom that fell by the wayside last year.

It's no surprise, too, that for the remainder of this World Rally season, Virtual Spectator will focus on enhancements to the 3D animated broadcast packages it provides to television. Until recently that had always been the Virtual Spectator story - provide animations to TV, as it did so successfully with the America's Cup, and then offer internet animations as a bonus.

It was a good solid business plan, but one that was quickly forgotten as the company was seized by dotcom hysteria.

In the process a deep rift developed between the TV guys and the internet guys in the company.

That all came to a head just before May when Endeavour Capital's Neville Jordan galloped in and bought the company's operations but left several million dollars of debt behind.

But before that, Dunedin-based Animation Research (the TV guys) also galloped in and bought an exclusive licence for Virtual Spectator's software to produce TV animations for several sports including yachting, cricket and golf. So the irony of Virtual Spectator now returning to its TV roots will not be lost on those who argued TV animation was the core business to pay the bills.

Where to now? Having lost the TV animation revenue for the America's Cup, Neville Jordan will have his work cut out trying to get a revenue stream flowing from internet subscriptions.

This time the company's net coverage will provide audio commentary, but even then the question remains: will enough yachting fans pay to watch?

Jordan has said he's focusing on deals with internet providers around the world to provide access to Virtual Spectator.

But it remains to be seen whether those arrangements will involve the bold step of making America's Cup internet coverage free.

If they did, I've no doubt users would flock in droves to see this world-class technology in action and another chapter might still be written in the Virtual Spectator book.

* Email Chris Barton

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