Santa Anita Park's in-house simulcast show is set to carry far more of the load for racing fans this autumn, moving from support player to leading act as FanDuel TV accelerates its retreat from day-to-day horse racing coverage. The shift arrives just as a 19-day autumn meet gets underway at the “Great Race Place,” ensuring that the track's own TV product, rather than a national cable channel, will frame most of the visuals and voices that bettors rely on for their decisions.
The Santa Anita simulcast show returns with a seasoned on-air crew that includes Michelle Yu, Zoe Cadman, Jessica Pyfer, and Millie Ball, backed by an experienced production team that has long catered to serious horseplayers. Opening day of the 2026 autumn stand is Friday, Sept. 25, kicking off a meet that runs Fridays through Sundays through closing day on Nov. 1, with every race available through the track's simulcast feed. That feed will be distributed across multiple outlets—1ST.TV, Calracing.com, Racetrack Television Network, and major advance-deposit wagering platforms such as 1stbet and Xpressbet—positioning Santa Anita's own show as the primary gateway to its product for remote players. Santa Anita's event calendar promotes the simulcast as a key part of its “FrontRunner” branding around live racing days, underscoring how central the in-house broadcast has become to the track's identity.
For now, FanDuel TV is not disappearing from Santa Anita screens entirely, but its role is changing in a way that signals the broader transition. Local coverage has reported that the network will still show Santa Anita races during the fall meet, but instead of producing its own broadcast, FanDuel will simply carry the track's in-house video and analysts, effectively turning the national cable outlet into a distribution arm for Santa Anita TV. That arrangement reflects FanDuel's longer-range plan: the network, which grew out of the old TVG brand and has served as a central hub of American racing for more than two decades, has begun cutting staff and winding down in-studio production as part of a strategy to cease linear racing broadcasts by 2027. Reports in the gaming trade press detail workforce reductions of roughly 60%, more than 100 job cuts tied to the TV pullback, and a timetable that phases out racing content while the company maintains its betting platforms.
For bettors, the practical impact of this autumn's shift is that Santa Anita's own cameras, graphics, and commentary will increasingly shape their view of races, even when they are watching via FanDuel. Instead of toggling between a track feed and a separate studio show, players will be getting a unified presentation built by horsepeople who live with Santa Anita's surfaces, quirks, and pace patterns every day. The same pictures and paddock shots that drive decisions on-site will now be the default for viewers on national TV and streaming outlets, which should sharpen the alignment between how the race looks to local trip-note makers and how it appears to the wider betting public. With Santa Anita's race video also available directly through santaanita.com and integrated into the wagering interfaces of major ADWs, the in-house feed is effectively becoming the single source of truth on how races were run.
The story at Santa Anita is part of a wider realignment in how North American racing is televised and streamed. Kentucky Downs, facing the same FanDuel retrenchment, has pushed its simulcast toward a mix of YouTube streaming, full-card coverage on Peacock, and selected major races on NBC and NBC Sports Network, using the shift as a chance to broaden its reach beyond traditional racing channels. Bloodstock and broadcast reports note that FanDuel TV is still honoring existing commitments to cover meets such as Del Mar, the Keeneland fall stand, and the Breeders' Cup, but plans to end in-studio racing coverage around December as part of its wind-down. At the same time, NYRA and FOX have expanded their “America's Day at the Races” programming, stepping into some of the daylight that FanDuel is vacating and reinforcing a landscape where individual racing organizations are more responsible for telling their own stories.
Within that shifting media map, Santa Anita's autumn schedule offers plenty of stakes-level storylines that will now be filtered primarily through the track's simulcast team. National viewing guides list the Santa Anita Sprint Championship Stakes on Sept. 27 as a featured event on FanDuel TV, but the pictures and analysis airing that day will originate on the apron in Arcadia rather than in an off-site studio. Daily Racing Form coverage of opening day has already highlighted matchups involving runners such as Jordi Bear and Proletariat in the local feature, signaling that the meet's narrative will be built around horses trying to break out of familiar rivalries and establish form heading into the Breeders' Cup preps. For handicappers, that puts a premium on closely watching Santa Anita's own replays, trip notes, and track-bias discussions, because those will increasingly be the lens through which the rest of the country sees Southern California racing—and, in a post-FanDuel era, the lens through which the pools are made.
