Cycling's Camera Arms Race Is a Fight for Millions of Dollars

I've watched the following video I don't know how many times. It's one of my favorites. I could never, and would never, do what it shows Kelly McGarry doing—the part of my brain that screams danger! is, if anything, overdeveloped—and yet here I am, sitting in the office, doing it along with him. When he points his bike down the side of the mountain in earnest the first time, I can't help but lean back and grab my desk, momentarily terrified. The video is immersive in a way few videos are. Or should I say few videos were.

GoPro, the company that built the camera on McGarry's helmet, has become near-ubiquitous in action sports. Nick Woodman, the now-billionaire founder of the camera company, designed it with surfing in mind—rugged, waterproof, high def. (On a recent episode of Shark Tank, he remarked on how lucky he was not to have chosen a surfing-related name for the camera, which would have limited its appeal.) In the last 12 years, the little cameras have gone way beyond surfing, becoming part of every mountain biker's and sky diver's toolkit. In the process, GoPro changed how we view those sports, literally and figuratively, allowing us to ride along and share in the experience.

While GoPro has cracked the action sports market wide open, it has yet to transfer into more mainstream sports, at least not to the same degree—something it's hoping to change in the near future. GoPro is reportedly in talks with several Tour de France race teams to supply on-board cameras for the 2015 Tour.

Such a move seems like a no-brainer for the company. The way the Tour has embraced technology—allowing fans to track race progress of their favorite riders online in minute detail—has been a huge boon for cycling. Onboard cameras are the obvious next step. But actually getting a GoPro on every bike in the Tour is more complicated than you might think.

For one thing, there's already competition in the market. At last year's Tour, several teams equipped on-bike cameras; none of them were GoPros. The most popular camera was the Shimano CM-1000. Judged purely on bulk, the CM-1000 might be better suited for a Tour bike. It's a wee bit bigger than a GoPro 4, but it's lighter: 83 grams versus 88 grams, respectively. Also, the CM-1000 is waterproof right out of the packaging whereas the GoPro requires a case, which brings the total weight to 152 grams. In the world of cycling, where every gram counts, that's a lot.

But you know what else counts in cycling? Money.

At the Tour, teams don't get a share of the television revenue. In order to get paid, they have to get a little more creative than, say, an NFL team. Velon, a new collective of 11 World Tour cycling teams, is seeking to maximize and diversify cycling teams' revenue streams. One of the ways to do that is through selling on-bike footage, or at least hosting it themselves for fans to access on team websites after races. Mounting a GoPro on a bike and selling the content after the race is great. But it's not likely to inject a massive amount of cash into cycling teams. And in any case, it's only the first step.

Racing teams really want the ability to live stream footage, technology that remains too bulky to incorporate at present, but which could be licensed to broadcasters once it is available, potentially breaking teams off a chunk of television revenue in the process. But as Road Cycling UK's Alex Palmer points out, it will be difficult for teams to claim that entire potential revenue stream for themselves:

The teams may lay claim to the rights as it requires cameras to be located on their bikes, but the reality is that without the co-operation of the race organisers, broadcasting the footage could be very difficult.

In any case, as I said right at the start, surely the main aim of this is to integrate on-bike footage into the live coverage of the race, which would be almost impossible to achieve without the involvement of the organiser and host broadcaster.

Whatever technology is used for those future live broadcasts, be it GoPro, Shimano, or something else, it will be a massive prize—much larger than whatever value a company can squeeze out of a deal to capture footage of the 2015 Tour.

In other words, the stakes are huge for GoPro. It's not just a race to negotiate a contract with a few 2015 Tour teams, it's a race to develop the technology that will almost certainly change the Tour forever, making live broadcasts as immersive and personal as that McGarry video, and, in the process, solidifying GoPro's place in the mainstream sports world.