By Citius Mag Staff
February 26, 2025
If you tuned into USAs on Saturday, congrats! You were officially a guinea pig for the first pay-per-view stream of a U.S. track championship, and you didn’t even know it. Nor did you have a choice.
Dedicated track fans had to wait until Friday to know for sure what their options for watching Day 1 of U.S. Indoors, as there was very little advance notice or clarity around the non-NBC streaming options for the meet. Per LetsRun, RunnerSpace’s longstanding partnership with USATF.TV ended at the end of 2024, and until last week, it was unclear if the federation had worked out any sort of formal deal with a new streaming partner for the federation. As recently as last Thursday, the USATF.TV website did not list any upcoming broadcasts on its schedule and no information was available about the first two-third of U.S. Indoors (only the track finals on Day 2 were broadcast on NBC and Peacock).
But at the last minute, a new-to-most provider called “Joymo,” a Norwegian video streaming service founded in 2017, swooped in to offer a $9.99 PPV purchase option to those who wanted to watch the Day 1 action, which included—among other attractions—the 3000m finals and both Olympic hurdles champions, live. On the bright side, that’s cheaper than Runnerspace’s $12.99/month subscription, which is essentially a de facto pay-per-view if the only time you sign up for a month is to watch USAs. The downside? You’re also paying two different fees for two different services to watch one meet that, again, wasn’t exactly packed with star power to begin with.
The announcement didn’t receive a universally glowing reception, to say the least. Most notably, Olympic hurdles champ Grant Holloway (also the only reigning World Indoor champ to bother returning to USAs this year) had this to say: “If you plan to watch the USATF Indoor Champs, consider waiting for it to be posted on Twitter or YouTube instead of paying for the PPV. It's surprising that we can't watch our own championships live, which is definitely an area that needs improvement.” It’s not a great look for USATF for arguably the biggest name at their championship to ask people not to pay to watch.
There’s inarguably a time and place for pay-per-view in track and field. Given the number of high-profile but one-off meets dotting the schedule, often with small-scale and/or independent organizers, it makes sense to offer a one-time fee for streams of races that aren’t attached to a major sponsor or a yearlong series to give diehards the chance to watch their faves compete live. And the road race circuit is, for now, scattered and idiosyncratic enough that it’s completely understandable that the best bet for bringing the Falmouth Road Race or Bolder Boulder to the masses is a PPV stream.
But for a USATF meet, especially a national track and field championship, it shouldn’t be an insurmountable challenge to get entire meets live-streamed online (or better yet, on television), for free or a low monthly cost. For all the complaints about the streaming status quo, Peacock has been a reliable, relatively high-quality, easily-accessible option for track live streams with the option to slot big meets into the TV schedule when circumstances allow.
NBC has announced its slate of USATF meets in 2025, and its previous eight-year deal (running through the end of 2024) included minimums for how many hours of track were to be broadcast each year. Without knowing the exact details of these agreements, there’s no way of knowing the size or nature of the barriers to simply putting the entirety of any major USATF championship (sorry, road 15km champs, but this isn’t about you) on streaming, which would seem to the outside observer the best path forward for the goals of consistency and access.
Another area where there’s clear room for improvement is in transparency and communication. Last week, LetsRun.com reported on recent layoffs in USATF staff that included the organization’s chief content officer and chief communications officer. So it’s understandable, albeit not acceptable, that anyone trying to plan their weekend track and field viewing was completely in the dark about the joys of Joymo until mere hours before the event. The past is past, but currently the “live and upcoming” page on USATF.TV is still completely empty, so moving forward that’s probably a good place to start.
Pay-per-view is likely here to stay, but the viewership bump it does (or doesn’t) create will ultimately depend on how it’s applied. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, so perhaps the changing of the streaming guard and the shifting landscape for consuming live track and field will engender innovation or, at least, more responsiveness to what viewers, old and new, actually want.
Citius Mag Staff
