With the end of the Aughts rapidly approaching, the r2 collective polled industry insiders, horseplayers, and fans for their top five technological innovations in racing during the past decade. Coming in at #2 is Proliferation of Race Replays.
Where would we be without easy to access race replays? I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I can easily spend hours at YouTube watching replays just for fun. But they’re not all fun and games, they’re a vital handicapping tool and have the potential to help market the game.
Since I only came on the scene in 2007, I queried my fellow r2-ers for their insights. Dean had this to share:
Replays are interesting to me, since I used them as a kid and growing up: 1990′s standing at the track watching the replay center races and waiting for a race you wanted to watch, or having to get there early to watch yesterdays races – hilarious. When the racing channels came aboard we would tape the races and that was our replay center.
I can only remember RaceReplays.com as the main source of replays when I first started playing and fellow r2-er Jessica confirms that she had an account as early as 2004. NYRA also used to embed their stakes races from RaceReplays.com into their site (now they have a direct log in which seems less useful).
As far as ADWs are concerned, I had a BrisBet account and don’t recall their replays however Jessica confirmed that they existed but were a pain to use. I’m happy to note that over the past 2-3 years that replays have exploded down the stretch, if you will.
Replays are standard fare for ADWs, and I can only assume some do it better than others.
Twinspires has two ways access them:
1) via track/date/horse search using the incredible TwinSpires TV:
2) via the race card’s program:
Youbet also has an extensive replay library as does TVG and Xpressbet.
While filed under Handicapping Software for the purposes of our countdown, DRF’s Formulator also has embedded replays which makes for some incredible ease of use.
Recent interesting and welcome additions to the replay arena are Thoroughbred Times and Blood Horse. Thoroughbred Times focuses on stakes but Blood Horse has an excellent extensive archive that also includes Non-Graded Stakes, Allowance/Optional Claiming, Maiden Special Weights and Maiden Claiming.
The replays are only one component of the archive that also features order of finish, payouts and pedigree information. They get extra points for having a dedicated Twitter feed (@BH_RaceResults) that automatically kicks out results.
The proliferation of race replays has not only been crucial for a handicappers, it’s also an excellent way for potential and/or new fans to connect with racing. Folks like Partymanners and CF1970, who have digitized their own personal replay collections, are squarely responsible for part of my racing self-education!
Tracks and such have followed suit with Churchill leading the way by adding what seems like all of their race replays from 2006 to the present. Hollywood Park has their stakes races both current and historical while NYRA, NTRA and Breeders’ Cup all make great use YouTube.
Easily accessed AND embeddable race replays have allowed for radically increased exposure to racing. Bloggers post races on their sites and fans post races on their profile pages at social media sites such as Facebook. For every racing fan who posts a race on their Facebook profile, N more people are more likely to see that race (where N is equal to the number of their contacts)… that’s some nice visibility.
And lastly, as a fervent iPhone user, I also enjoy NTRA & Breeders’ Cup replays as podcasts. Podcasts may seem pointless with a web enabled phone but they’re much higher quality than YouTube.
Not only are they useful as racing Prozac, they come in handy as a one-on-one gorilla marketing tool. I’ve been able to easily show friends and potential fans such thrilling races as Rachel Alexandra’s Preakness as we stand on a street corner or are grabbing a bite. Now if someone would just get Zenyatta’s Classic uploaded I would have all the high points of the year in my pocket, and if that’s not innovative I don’t know what is.
Panelists Comments
“When YouTube hit the web around mid-decade, everyone knew the web would never be the same. Video sharing was impossible (slow & clunky) to deal with before YouTube and the proliferation of Flash players. Sure HD is great but to get that souped up race car we had to start with the Model T. Having replays on the web, at the push of a button, changed *everything*.” – o_crunk
3 Responses
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I do like this choice, and agree about the potential freely available videos of races have in developing new fans for the sport – a need that has not gone away in the past few decades I’ve been involved with it. One hopes that this trend will continue. It has been frustrating to me to post a link to a YouTube video of a race, with no purpose than to highlight an interesting race (usually one I had been there to see), only to have it removed due to a track or company complaining that it infringed their copyright. That shortsighted approach will cost racing new fans, rather than gain new ones.
As an addition to your excellent list, I’d also like to add the At The Races site which allows access to many races run in the UK and Ireland (searched by horse name). There is also Equida for French run races, but for some very odd reason, not if you use a Mac – it seems they are tied to some odd software that limits you to a Windows platform, not just a specific browser or group of browsers.
At The Races does have a great site + YouTube page. When Churchill first started add all of their replays to YouTube they had embedding disabled. To their credit they’ve since relaxed their stance and allow embedding of all replays… hopefully that’s a sign that more will follow suite. Thanks for the comment!
Continuing the Discussion