International fans of the Australia’s V8 Supercars Championship faced a live streaming blackout for Race 3 of the Clipsal 500 today, with V8 Supercars’ online streaming offering, known as SuperView, suffering a major outage. The technical issue could not be rectified for the duration of Race 3 of the Clipsal 500. The service had been working earlier for Sunday’s qualifying sessions and for Saturday’s Races 1 and 2.
The service, which costs subscribers AUD 39.95 per year for access to all qualifying and races of the Championship, saw subscribers receive an error message “VE-PD-NOTFOUND” when they tried to view the official stream.
The official V8 Supercars twitter account tweeted about the issue saying that:
We are working to rectify a problem with the SuperView service which is out of our control. We hope to have it resolved as soon as possible.
— V8 Supercars (@v8supercars) March 6, 2016
As expected, many fans took to Twitter to voice their disappointment of not being unable to watch a race via the usually fantastic service. It was especially disappointing as from all reports the 250km Race 3 had much excitement due to the wild weather that hit the streets of Adelaide during the race. The rain-affected race was eventually won by Lucas Dumbrell Motorsport’s Nick Percat.
Still in the dark without SuperView. Very disappointing. Sounds like I’m missing a great race, based on the tweets coming through. #V8SC
— scorpshockey (@scorpshockey) March 6, 2016
While there will always be times when technology fails, it is unfortunate that there appeared to be no back-up service for fans to be able to watch the race. Instead fans could either follow the race via twitter, V8 Supercars’ live timing option or it seems watch pirated streams.
There has been no further word on Twitter from V8 Supercars as to what caused the SuperView issue, but hopefully Race 3 from the Clipsal 500 will be available for replay on the SuperView service soon.