IndyCar’s partnership with NTT will bring pluses and a few minuses

NTT has zero interest to grow IndyCar popularity with consumers, but it does want to do deals with other sponsors in the paddock. Many American IT staff will lose jobs to India

While NTT does not sell product to consumers, and hence has zero interest to promote IndyCar to consumers with TV ads, magazine ads, and the like, it does have two interests.

One is to sell its IT services to other sponsors in the paddock with B2B deals to justify the cost to sponsor the IndyCar series – providing lower cost IT services from India, Mexico, Japan and a small percentage in the USA, putting American workers on the unemployment line. But NTT isn't alone in doing this. Firms like Cognizant, DXC Technology, WiPro, HCL, IBM, TCS, Atos, etc have all been doing this for years resulting in hundreds of thousands of American IT staff who have lost their jobs. It's globalization in the true sense of the word – lower overhead costs so the company President gets his big bonus.

The second is to provide IndyCar with IT services, including data mining and analysis.

“NTT is developing the next generation app for IndyCar," IndyCar CEO Mark Miles said. “It will be open to everybody. There will be no need to authenticate with a cable provider (with the Verizon App you have to be a Verizon Subscriber). You will not need to be a customer with any one mobile provider. And it will be free. It will truly be open to all to watch races live."

Beyond that, the partnership with NTT will take the driver and car data that is collected as part of race and harness it for both the teams and the public. For those who follow baseball, the partnership with NTT may open up a “Statcast for IndyCar," and there’s already been some work done to show how that might look.

Tony Kanaan has worked with NTT for some time. NTT Data was his primary sponsor when he was with Chip Ganassi Racing in 2012. “NTT is still my personal sponsor," he tells me. “That’s what kind of relationship I have with them."

Kanaan went on to say that he worked with NTT for a shirt that captured all kinds of biometrics when he was in the car racing.

“It would show what kind of dehydration I was having. How my heart rate would go from 80bpm to 160bpm. It was showing me that I wasn’t breathing through the corners at Indy. Imagine what can be done with that."

As Miles said, NTT Data becomes a huge asset for the teams and broadcasts. It’s big data for racing. As one small example, that bug that’s on the screen that follows the car telling you who is driving during broadcasts? That’s telemetry being fed to the broadcast.

“In an average two-hour IndyCar race, our timing and scoring group with the technology today pull 50 million data records the cars," Miles said. That data is currently used by the teams and Honda and Chevrolet, which supply the engines. That helps the drivers and the manufacturers get smarter.

But the NTT partnership would allow that to expand. Imagine making race control smarter with the potential for AI to see scenarios that are likely to happen and other advances in technology that will assist in officiating. But Miles sees it going further still.

“In my mind, when you mine that data with great technology, it creates content that the fans would like and present it in a way that they’ll love."

It will be interesting to see how it all unfolds. Miles said NTT has a commitment as part of the partnership to invest in technology with IndyCar.

Formula 1's streaming TV service offers great analytics

Visualizing the car and driver data in TV broadcasts would provide additional content that is key to retaining and attracting viewers to live content.

So the sponsorship agreement to replace Verizon as the entitlement sponsor of the IndyCar Racing Series is much more than branding. The deal will present IndyCar racing in new ways, make drivers and teams better through advanced analytics, make race control more aware of what is happening during races, and all that on top of now being able to have races streamed to all for free.

The downside is that free streaming on mobile devices will result in lower TV ratings followed by sponsors leaving the sport due to the lower ratings.

Unless the teams can monetize the mobile streaming (they can't) to make up for the lost revenue when sponsors quit the sport, giving away content for free has the same result as the socialist/democrat tax and spend party in the USA who want to give everyone a free college education with no way to pay for it but to tax you and I.

There is also no mention of how the app will compete with the NBC Gold pay service. Why pay for something when you can get it for free?