Friday, 29.03.2024 | Deutsch | English
Truck Racing and TV

Truck Racing and TV

13. August 2008At all the races there is a large TV team on the spot from the Cologne production company Kamiono. While by now almost worldwide there are detailed TV reports about the races of the FIA European Truck Racing Championship mostly by free-to-air television channels, unfortunately the better part of the Germans has no chance to watch the races, unless they are connected to a cable network that provides MOTORS TV, too. Otherwise there are only occasional 3-minute reports on truck or motorsports programmes such as ‘n-tv speed’. By contrast – by mid-June there were more than 81 hours of TV reports concerning truck racing aired by umpteen telestations worldwide. The complete footage, which is financed by sponsors, is provided free of charge. But the free-to-air TV channels eligible for the German viewing area wanted a considerable amount of money in addition. But this would have meant to overrun the budget. And as the final decision in favour of TV was made shortly before the start of the season in Barcelona, there was no chance to look for other possibilities.
On the occasion of the Truck Grand Prix on the Ring there was, for the first time, a live coverage of truck racing – on the internet. In the last two years the commentaries from the circuit were already provided live by „truckracing.de / truckrace.info“, but now there were the corresponding pictures, too. This decision was also reached at relatively short notice. And it was new territory for everybody – there weren’t any empirical values at our disposal. Finally a total of 25 servers were employed, with 3 of them for the sole purpose to assign the inquiries of the users evenly to the other 22 servers. Thus the capacity limit, with a fine picture quality, was consistently at 4,500 users with the option, in case of a stable process, to top up this maximum number to 6,000 if required. And indeed, this proved necessary on Sunday afternoon. The number of viewers totalled up to 21,000.
But we don’t want to raise false hopes; such a live transmission is only possible at the Nürburgring at present. For all the other truck racing event there will be no live TV pictures available.
A 6-minute montage from Kamiono TV showing the highlights of the TGP can be watched on this website – under ‘Videos’. The original film is without comment, but there is copyrighted background music. Therefore these highlights are provided here without sound.