Flatter: Death of FanDuel TV does not have to be ‘the end’

It has been more than 60 years since Marshall McLuhan wrote “the medium is the message.” As one of my late college profs translated it, “Don’t worry about a world crisis until the morning your newspaper does not show up.”

Newspapers stopped showing up years ago. And now the medium is FanDuel TV. In the coming months it will be a shadow of its former self. By the end of next year it will be completely gone. And yes, I am worried.

Report: FanDuel TV will be gone by end of 2027.

In the 27 years since it was born as TVG, the channel has provided a singular soundtrack for our game. Not the only one. Just the drumbeat that turned into our earworm.

The idea of round-the-clock racing in one place seemed ahead of its time, even if it was a natural extension of those old Harvey Pack highlights shows out of New York. Now we are told that it is behind the times. Hell, don’t haters always say that about horse racing? This time, corporate bean counters are the haters who are making that declaration while they pull the plug.

I reached out to a half-dozen FDTV’ers when Paulick Report broke the bad news Friday. They all confirmed the cold feeling of the message that was delivered in a memo and on a corporate Zoom call. They all said it was a blindsided shock.

Hindsight shows us why we might have seen it coming, even as far back as 2009. That was when Betfair merged with Paddy Power to form Flutter, which bought TVG for $50 million and later gobbled up HRTV. FanDuel started to infiltrate in 2018. Four summers ago it became the channel’s name. Kay Adams was paid a bundle to leave NFL Network and launch a work-from-home morning sports show. Suddenly, racing round the clock was down to half a 24-hour lap.

But those were not the biggest clues the death knell was about to be heard. The plunge of Flutter stock was the real sign. Only seven months ago it was trading at $313.68 on the New York Stock Exchange. On Friday it closed at $129.80. In raw terms, that 59% freefall is a paper loss of $35 billion.

The FanDuel regional networks that were carrying baseball games were of no corporate relation to the racing channel. Sorry. That should have said the Adams and racing channel. Supposedly the local channels’ demise had nothing to do with this one. Then again, FanDuel paid real money to attach its name to those outlets that went bankrupt last year, so this might have been more than just bad karma.

Now we hope and pray that a genie comes out of a bottle or one of Mike Repole’s mansions to buy what used to be TVG and rename it TVG and make it the TVG we came to know and watch and love and hate for more than a generation. But that really is wishful thinking. Rich genies and Repole did not get their spiffy pads by investing in money-losing ventures. Copy and paste this paragraph when we get around to iconic racetracks in the next few years.

Gone are the days when we could wish for a scoundrel like Charles Foster Kane. He said, “I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. ... At the rate of a million dollars a year, I’ll have to close this place. In 60 years.”

Even in fiction, Kane went broke faster than that. His kind really are not lifelines anymore. Corporate investors have chewed them up, spat them out and replaced them with hatchet men like George Clooney in “Up in the Air.” These days, why build up and gamble when it is fashionably more lucrative to tear down and profit? Bold thinking be damned.

Cynically speaking, this is happening everywhere. Those newspapers that were used as a McLuhanesque example in college have been dying for decades. We just heard that CBS News Radio is going away after 98 1/2 years just like the original NBC and Mutual networks before it. Television news, once a profit center for local stations, is an oxymoronic dinosaur populated now by kids wearing adult clothes. Even old digital media like email have eroded, and influencers are abandoning YouTube.

So we are left with all these racetracks and all these TV images. They are not going away. We can see them all on our ADWs and via Roberts Communications Network, which cryptically has a “TV package coming soon” note on its web page. All this is for we, the proud, the loyal degenerates.

Meanwhile, the looming extinction of FanDuel TV will leave a big void for the flyover gambler and sports fans who do what we used to call channel surfing. Now I guess it is menu surfing. What we still fondly remember as TVG scratched that itch for an untold number of fans who might come by and throw a few casual dollars on a race and then, maybe, get hooked on the game.

I do have to wonder, though, how much of that still matters? Now we surf with our thumbs through dog videos, travel hacks and amateur musicians on Instagram. At least that is what my algorithms are feeding me.

Full disclosure now. Years ago I stopped watching FanDuel TV on an everyday basis. Not because I did not like it. I found I liked it too much. Their voices were seeping into my subconscious. I may as well have been plagiarizing them. FDTV content became a distraction to the focus on my work, more and more of which involved covering races while sitting at home. More full confession. Most racing sites do it that way now for all but the biggest stakes.

An example of how good FDTV is has been in critical commentary, especially from social-media anonymoids. The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference. I know few racing fans who have been indifferent to FDTV. It has been like a public utility, an airline, a spouse. We can gripe about them all the time, but we prefer not to live without them.

Maybe “TV package coming soon” will hire some of the FanDuel TV colleagues who went through the torture of their mass layoff. I know the feeling. Hell, I was whacked from a job once with an early-morning phone call summoning me to come downstairs and retrieve the written notice from a bonded courier who was standing at my door and demanding my signature. These things never go well.

None of this presumes what happened to Mike and Christina and Caton and Scott and Joaquin and Andie and before them to Todd was wrong, right or otherwise in the glare of James Carville’s famous line “it’s the economy, stupid.” The death notice for FDTV was another byproduct of our shrinking media and, gulp, our shrinking sport.

That does not mean we should stop playing to the strengths that remain bedrocks. The game is healthy in Kentucky and New York and Arkansas and seems to be going the right direction in Virginia and might be yet in Maryland. Cable has morphed into streaming, but we still watch live video in some form on TV and laptops and tablets and phones. We still bet billions of dollars on races. If anyone is stupid enough to abandon this market, there are plenty of smart folks who can build on what can be profitable.

Besides, there must be a better way to watch the races than trying to play Whac-A-Mole every Saratoga summer with all the Fox channels.

Senior writer Ron Flatter is the semi-retired managing editor who writes occasional columns for Horse Racing Nation.