As digital media and broadband access becomes more pervasive, sporting teams, leagues, and series need to be considering online as an option for distribution. Many of the sporting leagues (via the broadcasters) are on top of this and for the most part running a really good service. IRL appears to have attempted this on their own with a third party vendor. The result has been quite dismal.

During the last two races I have had intermittent access and choppy feeds of both races.

During the Indy Japan 300 my online experience was this beautiful white page highlighting the issue: Server is too busy.

My online experience for the Roadrunner Turbo 300 was a different white page highlighting another message: server is not responding.

IRL needs to be demanding a stable service for their online users and White Blox (the third party provider) should be throwing more resources at any upcoming race. It is clear that their servers are struggling to keep up with the audience's demands. In addition to throwing more resources at this problem, both IRL and White Blox should be tracking bandwidth, user and site errors and they should be creating base error pages for their respective sites for when issues occur. Theses error pages should tell the user what has happened and how to fix it or contact someone for support. Plus, they're a last attempt to gracefully save what face you have left as a brand.

To deliver a better service IRL may want to work more closely with the broadcasters or try leveraging their relationships with Joost. Joost has demonstrated that they can provide good quality web video, now they need to try streaming a race!

With the massively marketed 92nd Indy 500 getting closer (May 25, 2008), I hope changes are in place so every member of IRL's audience will be given the best experience possible.

Your Turn. What have your experiences been with Race Control? Are you using it? Avoiding it? Playing with the free version or experimenting with the pay per season edition? What would you like to see changed or are you happy with your experiences?