Beach Volleyball Mailbag: What’s up with the AVP’s streaming? Is Klineman coming back?

HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — There are two major events remaining on the AVP calendar: This weekend’s Manhattan Beach Open, and the annual Chicago event on Labor Day weekend. The season-ending Championships have been scheduled for September 22-23, but that is all we know. Don’t know the format, where it might be held, how many teams will be competing and, everybody’s favorite topic at the moment, where they might be able to watch.

We had our semi-monthly episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter this week, which includes our lovely moderator, Savvy Simo. All anyone wanted us to chat about was the streaming. Below is a small sampling of our 100-plus inquiries from fans, the majority of which were about, you guessed it, streaming:

Is there any way we can get the AVP to figure out this streaming? On Sunday I had to have ESPN, Ballys and cable to watch the matches. Also, could we get the semis one after another instead of at the same time? 

A lot of fans have complained about streaming matches this year. What do the athletes think?

Do players think streaming on ESPN+ and Bally is worth it even when it’s alienating fans?

Do you think the AVP broadcasting will ever get back to the quality of Amazon Prime? It’s BAD.

How’s the AVP organization for the players? As a fan tuning in remotely, the experience is confusing and bad. 

What should the AVP do about broadcasting? Move to their own steaming app?

Is the streaming platform musical chairs bad for the sport, even if it lands on one with a bigger reach?

Is the way the AVP is aired/streamed good? What should they do?

Does the AVP need to rethink their broadcasting?

Why can’t the AVP figure out streaming?

These aren’t new complaints. The fans have been disgruntled about the streaming since the first event, in Miami in March. Larry Hamel wrote a story detailing the response from the fans, and they haven’t grown much fonder of the streaming experience — a combination of Bally Live on an app, ESPN+, and ESPN2 — since. If you read that story from Miami, the comments above are virtually the same as the questions we received earlier this week.

Atlanta, however, seemed to be a tipping point.

We’ve been doing fan question episodes regularly since March, and while the streaming is always a topic, it’s never been this overwhelming. Dana’s comment at the top, referencing needing three different apps or channels to view matches within a span of four hours, is what I’d guess to be the final straw for many. To watch one semifinal, you needed ESPN+, and to watch the other, you needed Bally Live. To tune into the women’s finals, you needed ESPN2, which does not come with ESPN+, and to tune into the men’s finals, well, you couldn’t, as storms delayed it to the point that I guess no streaming was possible. I watched via FaceTime.

As Savvy pointed out during our episode, we as the athletes “have no control.” We also don’t know the terms of any of the deals the AVP has had in the past — Amazon Prime, Peacock, and now ESPN and Bally Live. So we don’t know if the AVP had a good deal with Amazon or NBC or ESPN or not. We don’t know who was covering production costs, any upfront payments, what percentage of subscriptions was going where — we don’t know any of that, which limits much of what we can really critique or compliment about the streaming, other than the fact that it seems to be alienating fans.

Many of the complaints are about the streaming being behind a paywall, yet most fans consider the Amazon Prime stream to be the golden standard — a stream that was also behind a paywall. I’d guess more people already had Amazon Prime than ESPN+, so maybe it wasn’t an extra cost incurred, but still: Paying for a product isn’t, in my mind, an issue. If you want something for free, it’s probably not going to be any good — see: Bally Live — or it will make so little financial sense that it goes away — see: YouTube, which was also where LIV golf events initially lived until it eventually signed a deal of its own.

I think Volleyball World TV is a phenomenal product, and almost all of the fans I chat with are happy to pay whatever it is they pay — either $8/month for everything, or $6/month just for beach — because they get to watch any match they want, on demand or live, with commentary from excellent personalities such as Simon Golding, Clayton Lucas, Damien Schumann, and a host of others.

Amazon Prime also had that. I thought Kevin Barnett did a tremendous job, not just as a commentator — honest, thoughtful, witty, insightful — but as a host, with his giant hammer and sometimes corny but entertaining stunts on center court and behind the scenes. Barnett and Camryn Irwin and the rest of the team had fun post-match interviews and the production value was excellent.

Here it’s also important to remember: There was no shortage of viewers complaining about the coverage from Amazon Prime. A perfect streaming platform doesn’t exist, not to fans, anyway. This goes across all sports and all fanbases. The direct feedback I get from fans watching on Volleyball TV is roughly 90 percent positive, but there is still that 10 percent who send me long emails and messages upset about elements of Volleyball TV many rave about. That’s just the way it goes.

Another note that is important to remember: When I first started playing in qualifiers, the stream was on the AVP Facebook page. This is not that long ago. Since, the musical chairs has been difficult to follow, from Facebook to Amazon Prime to Peacock to YouTube to ESPN+ and Bally Live and ESPN2. That’s brutal for fans, but all of those options are also better than Facebook.

Fans did enjoy the YouTube stream for the most part, but it was free, which doesn’t make much sense from a business standpoint, unless you find a way to sell enough ads via the YouTube stream for it to make sense. Having a smidgen of experience in YouTube monetization with SANDCAST, I can’t imagine that being the case, especially given the viewership numbers of the matches that were streamed (rarely did a match eclipse 50,000 viewers). Volleyball World has dialed in the best of both worlds: A monetized streaming app with highlights on YouTube, which are also monetized and point viewers back to Volleyball TV.

In my perfect world, the AVP would get a deal with Volleyball World TV. All the volleyball you can watch on one, awesome, simple app, where the reach is global and you’re hitting your direct market of volleyball fans. It would essentially become NFL Red Zone for volleyball fans.

How that would work out, I don’t know. Both parties — Volleyball World and the AVP — would want it to be a financial win for them, as they should, but the feasibility of that is easier said than done. A model similar to the one AppleTV has with the MLS could, in a perhaps overly idealistic world, work. On AppleTV, users can sign up for an MLS League Pass, or bundle it in with their AppleTV subscription. An AVP pass for an extra few bucks on Volleyball TV would be a no-brainer for me to buy. Again, how that would work would get complicated, since, among several issues that would need ironing out, the AVP and Volleyball World often have conflicting events — Manhattan Beach vs. Hamburg, Gstaad vs. Hermosa, Saquarema vs. New Orleans, La Paz vs. Miami this year alone.

Traditionalists would argue, of course, that without linear TV exposure, the growth of the game would be limited. There’s some truth to that, and that is the exact fault line upon which the Pac-12 fell apart, as schools jumped ship when the only television deal the conference could land was with AppleTV. As I said: The perfect stream doesn’t exist. But I also don’t personally know a single person who simply scrolls through their channels anymore and begins watching something that popped up on their menu. Maybe that’s just the millennial in me.

All that said, I’d expect there to be a change next year. What that change will look like, I don’t know. The one thing I do know for sure is that someone, somewhere, probably won’t be pleased with it, and we’ll be answering similar questions in a year from now.

See y’all here next year!

What adjustments do Sara and Kelly need to make coming up short in Montreal and Atlanta? 

Do you think Kelly and Sara are in just a little slump or are other teams figuring them out?

If this is a slump, it’s a slump most athletes would love to be in.

I’d like to rewind back to Montreal for a minute. It’s 14-12 in the third set of the ninth-place rounds. Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes have a pair of match points, against Brandie Wilkerson and Melissa Humana-Paredes. Should have had more, too. They had been up 8-4 — just as they had been down 4-8 in the Gstaad Elite16 quarterfinals — but Humana-Paredes and Wilkerson tied it up at 10-10. Now it’s 14-12 after a Hughes cut shot. Wilkerson chops a cut of her own, but Hughes and Cheng still have a simple sideout to win the match. Hughes, perfectly in system on the ensuing point, tries the same dart into the angle that had worked on the previous play, only this one catches the top of the tape, Humana-Paredes digs it easily and hits an angle swing that knots it at 14-14. The Canadians go on to win the match and, subsequently, the entire tournament.

If either of those match points go differently, these questions don’t come into our inbox. So it’s difficult to label this a “slump,” but such is the nature of the Beach Pro Tour: A handful of points can drastically shift the course of your season. Hughes and Cheng were sort of due to let one get away after requiring a miracle comeback in Gstaad, where they won silver. The universe balanced itself out.

To dub their third place finish in Atlanta as further evidence of a “slump” seems a bit rash to me as well. To date, Cheng and Hughes have lost one match — one! — on the AVP since their partnership began last fall. That one came in the semifinals of Atlanta, to Wilkerson and Humana-Paredes, in a well-played 18-21, 20-22 loss. Is that a slump, or just two matches where the deciding set between two of the best teams on the planet went into overtime?

It’s a supreme compliment to Cheng and Hughes that some are labeling their recent run of tournaments as a slump, when considering that since May, they’ve won an AVP in Huntington Beach, a silver medal in Gstaad, only lost a single match in Atlanta, and finished fifth in Ostrava and ninth in Montreal in a seesaw match to the team who would eventually win gold.

Now, was it their best volleyball of 2023? Definitely not. They barely broke pool in Montreal and had a few oddly close calls in Atlanta. The mental fatigue at this point in the season, particularly in an Olympic qualifying year, is the biggest challenge to most athletes on Tour, not to mention the athletes on Tour who are the No. 1 team, the one everyone wants to beat. I’d expect, with a little rest after Chicago, that the Paris Elite16 and World Champs will feature a rejuvenated corps of American teams, including Cheng and Hughes.

If Alix Klineman made a late run for Paris, who might consider a partner switch?

At the moment, Alix is signed up for World Championships with Hailey Harward. So for one, it’s awesome, and amazing, that she’s healthy enough to compete at the highest level in the world just a few months after giving birth to her son. If she were to compete in Mexico this October, she would need a wild card to do so, given the World Championships qualification process is your best six finishes as a team in the 2023 season. Klineman and Harward obviously have no finishes as a team, so a wild card is the only route.

But here is where it gets extra tricky: Harward has a bid to World Championships with Kelley Kolinske via NORCECA. It’s a bid nobody expected they’d actually be able to use, because the USA was expected to hit its country quota of four teams who qualified via points, which it did in Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, Sarah Sponcil and Terese Cannon, and Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles. But with Sponcil and Cannon splitting up, only three USA teams have qualified, and Harward and Kolinske could then use the NORCECA route they earned to compete in Tlaxcala.

There is, however, the possibility of Cannon or Sponcil subbing in someone, but that would mean one of them would have to withdraw and let the other play with a different partner. Who knows what will come of it, and I won’t speak for Cannon or Sponcil here, but what had appeared to be a straightforward World Championships is getting quite interesting. If Cannon or Sponcil is able to sub someone else in, then Harward and Kolinske’s NORCECA bid would again be moot, and Harward could still potentially get a wild card with Klineman.

If they don’t get a wild card? I’m not sure if Klineman would have the time to qualify. We don’t know what the 2024 schedule looks like, but the cutoff is June 9 of 2024. If there aren’t 12 significant events for Klineman to play, it would be almost mathematically impossible to qualify, but until the schedule comes out, I’ll never rule out an Alix Klineman from accomplishing anything.