It's hard to believe, but the 2025 MotoGP season opener already took place over the weekend in Buriram, Thailand. As Dorna keeps filling out the calendar with seemingly more and more race weekends each year, the starting weekend gets closer and closer to the winter testing dates, seemingly with every season.
But to kick off 2025 on a bad note, Dorna once again showed US fans how little it thinks of us.
See, for years now, it's done this thing where it doesn't announce where the official US broadcast license will land until just a couple of days before the season opener. That, naturally, left US MotoGP fans scrambling, as we had to figure out if we already had subscriptions to whatever service Dorna had seen fit to sign a contract with this year, or if we needed to go add yet another subscription to the seemingly neverending list if we just can't live without our MotoGP fix.
For the record, it's on Fox Sports in 2025. But US fans didn't find out about that until the teams had already touched down in Thailand for the season opener, and I'm not kidding.
And of course, there's Dorna's own subscription service, MotoGP VideoPass, which will guarantee seamless, uninterrupted viewing to meet all your MotoGP streaming (and behind-the-scenes) needs. Can't blame them for wanting folks to subscribe to it, of course. But at the same time, a LOT of people already have too many subscriptions to too many other things. Those things, they cost money, and you've seen what eggs cost these days.
For a sporting promotional organization, they sure don't seem to want to make it easy for US-based MotoGP fans to actually watch the sport, which is supposedly the closest thing the motorcycle world has to Formula One. It's not just me who's annoyed by this, either; you can delve into US-based MotoGP Reddit threads every time a season starts and find similar complaints.
Because, quite frankly, it sucks.
I'm not sure how Dorna handles broadcast rights in other countries, but this seems calculatedly ham-handed and sloppy. Maybe it isn't; maybe they're just really bad at promoting the sport here? Honestly, I'm not sure.
By contrast, look at how nice Formula One has its international broadcast page for fans laid out. Listen, there are plenty of antitrust arguments to make about Liberty Media's proposed takeover of Dorna (and thus, MotoGP), and indeed the European Commission is currently in the process of making them.
But it's hard to deny that some things seem to be working more smoothly over on that side of the motorsport pond, and equally hard to deny that Dorna seems to want to regularly shoot itself in the foot with regard to growing its already ardent international MotoGP fanbase.
Something needs to change. I wrote about how HBO Max's deal to stream MotoGP in the US last year started out rockily, but then improved pretty quickly once the season got going. By the end of the 2024 season, it was actually pretty good!
But apparently, that was only good for a single year, and who knows if access to even that single year will soon disappear because of however long the license agreement was signed for. As a longtime motorsport fan who's been following series that aren't NASCAR or IndyCar for decades now, I'm very familiar with the broadcast channel chase game. And I'm tired of it. Aren't you?
Fans deserve better. Period.
