America’s Cup Capers Continuing….

By Richard Gladwell, Sail-World
Two months have now passed since New Zealand won the America’s Cup, with not a lot being forthcoming on how the next event will shape up.

What has been released is a big improvement on what was produced in the run up to the last four America’s Cups.

On the 35th America’s Cup on Bermuda, it is incredibly disappointing to see the America’s Cup video content taken down off Youtube, a month after the event concluded.

This does not just include the media conferences and other reports that were produced on a daily basis, but everything going back to, and including the previous 2013 America’s Cup in San Francisco.

Those Cup fans who follow the traffic on the old 2013 San Francisco videos will know that they kept getting replays and had some very good viewer numbers.

There was an enormous of content generated during the 35th America’s Cup – and many fans will not have got around to viewing all of it. Now it would seem to have vanished for ever.

For all the comment from those involved in the Golden Gate YC’s team and marketing/event management arm about wanting to lift interest in the America’s Cup, and sailing generally, this seems to be a very strange way to do it.

How does it benefit the sport to have all official footage and images suppressed a month after the event?

It gets worse.

The America’s Cup website has been switched to an online America’s Cup clothing store based in Manchester UK.

Also gone is the America’s Cup image library – a vital source of some outstanding images for sailing and non-sailing media. That too is diverted to the same discount-sale site. This won’t affect Sail-World too much as we have our own image content – but that’s not the situation for most publications.

When the much maligned Swiss team Alinghi lost the America’s Cup in 2010, they at least kept the content of that available for several months. But other than pirate copies that video is also not publicly available either.

The 35th America’s Cup Facebook page with over 400,000 followers was also taken down and then reappeared a few days later under the name of 35ACBDA – with all the original content. But that too now seems to have gone.

Those with a passing knowledge of website and social media process will know that to hand-over the content is a simple matter of passing over the keys to the new owner, and the sites can continue in their original form for fans. The cost is relatively insignificant.

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