Two conferences early last week in Paris and London tried to address racing's decreasing share of the wagering world last week, with one resorting to older, failed solutions and another looking more towards the future.
The keynote speaker at the inaugural Leaders in Racing conference in London, Jockey Club chief executive Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges, addressed racing's diminishing share of the global betting market and warned that racing needed rebranding and structural changes to reposition itself and that included a reference to the lack of vertical integration.
Of course, he spoke from a position of advantage. Hong Kong is an exception.
The Jockey Club owns everything - the racecourses, the betting, the prize-money levels, sponsorship rights, race programming and the vital component of the audio-visual presentation of racing. It is already vertically integrated to the eyeballs.
Granted, it isn't easy in other jurisdictions where rights to all these elements of the sport, most notably betting and live and archived video are in many different hands and jealously guarded. But they must be high on the to-do lists.
Just a day or two earlier in Paris, at the annual post-Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe conference of the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities, it was interesting to note speakers still calling on racing to have better relationships with free-to-air television in efforts to reach an audience. It's a call as old as racing itself - well, all right, not quite, but as old as just about anyone in racing has been alive.
Free-to-air television does have reach and is still a knee-jerk kind of option for racing administrators, but its great days have passed and it is steadily heading for dinosaur status and the future must be in new media, owned and provided by racing authorities themselves.