So Strava have stopped allowing ride data to be used by Relive and the comms about the matter from both companies couldn’t be more contradictory!
Strava email arrived first and said “We’ve worked hard with Relive to try to fix this, but they have ultimately chosen not to make the changes needed to honor their agreement.”
Now Relive have sent an email out saying “We then tried to call, email, and talk this out with Strava. No response.”
No doubt the battle for access to our data is driving so many decisions right now and we need to be careful who has what data and how it’s being used. Really interested in how this one plays out, no doubt Strava probably feel like de to their size they hold all the cards.
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not sure what relive were expecting really, trying to introduce more ‘social’ features. strava were obviously going to stop them from becoming any kind of threat to their platform.
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I looked at one ride on relive and thought it nothing more than a gimmick
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It is, initially I thought that’s pretty neat but interest faded.
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Yeah, it was a cool little app for some of your more epic rides. Sad to see them lose the direct integration with Strava, was always frustrated you needed to have all your rides public by default to have them picked up by relive-- couldn’t just import the rides you cared about.
Never quite understood Relive’s business model though: charge no money (not even ads) to do what seemed fairly significant video processing, storage and bandwidth. Always just guessed they were hoping to last long enough to be bought out by UnderArmour (MapMyRide) or Strava etc.
(If Strava is interested, it’s a hell of a way to get the price to drop.)
Based on the way that the two emails were worded it seems like there is something else going on. Potentially Strava trying to do something of their own?
I’m increasingly nervous about Strava. They appear to have made little or no progress in recent years. Most recently changes to things like segments and monthly challenges - where to be involved you have to consent to public data access - are HUGE warning bells. As with all social companies - you are the product being sold to anyone who’ll pay. Segments and challenges for virtual badges are scant benefits for giving up rights to your data.
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I like Relive. Just like @doobeh I used it for my more important rides. It is interesting that Strava haven’t been very innovative recently and then they cut something off that a little different. Maybe they’re doing something on there own. Time will tell I suppose.
Yeah, I cancelled Strava Prem a year or so ago. Nothing to pay for. As long as it stays free for segment leader board, no reason to pay. They haven’t done anything to the platform in years. The route building is terrible too.
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The segment leaderboards are interesting - to be involved your ride must be public. So by definition you give up any rights to it. My take on that, is you give carte blanche permission for Strava (or anyone) to (ab)use your ride data for whatever they want. Most will sleepwalk into that position without realising and I think that’s unacceptable for any social platform.
i thought they were fairly open about the fact that they sell all the user generated data to municipalities / town planners / infrastructure businesses etc - or at least i thought most users were aware that’s what strava’s core business actually is
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You used to be able to compete on leaderboards and be private. But now you have to give up your rights for that minor benefit so they can sell you onward.
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Been on the turbo/ TR all week, but ran this morning. I had set it up with Garmin Connect too, and it seems to have defaulted to Garmin Connect as I got the relive notification.
I have to manual upload my outdoor rides to Connect (from my bolt), so will be interesting to see if that gives the option.
I like relive to be honest, I prefer to share that to social media than a strava file.
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I consider giving my ride data to Strava as a service to the wider cycling community. They do make money off it but its used for planning municipal bike lanes, etc so I’m not only OK with that, but happy to play my tiny part in that process. Hats off to Strava for coming up with a win win way to collect this data on a mass scale.
On a more personal level, I use Strava heat maps, ride data and segments to plan riding routes when traveling so publicly logging your local rides can directly help other cyclists.
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Dang, that is one heck of an article. Strava is too big for it’s britches. I am about to look at how I can migrate my use of it to other services and ditch it all together. Those guys need to get knocked down a few pegs and realize the wrongs they are doing.
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i’ve just cancelled my summit membership
not really fussed about the relive integration specifically, but it has made me question why i’m supporting strava
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I’m very niave with regards to all this API integration. Does it cost Strava money to open up its platform to Relive either in direct costs or overhead?
Activity files eat up diskspace and backups, and it can be surprisingly hard preserve these things long term. But of course they’re already holding onto those, and it’s critical to their business, so that shouldn’t count.
Bandwidth costs money, but it’s pretty darn cheap and ride files aren’t that big. If you put pictures on your activity, those files are much larger than the actual activity data itself, but still pretty small in the scheme of “things on the internet”.
There’s some operational costs with the servers to handle requests, but it shouldn’t be a computationally expensive thing. I bet you cost strava more money in CPU time when you reprocess segments on an activity.
Lastly, there’s ongoing maintenance to keep the api functional, and secure and whatever else they need to do internally to keep it working well. But, again, they’re doing this anyway. There are lots of 3rd party integration tools, and while not every tool uses every part of the api, it’s not like they’re maintaining parts of the api specially for Relive.
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Is there an alternative way to upload outdoor rides to the TR calendar, i.e., not via Strava?