Marc Priestly is hosting F1 Report this week so it will be interesting to see how he does as a presenter compared to a pundit.

Apart from radio, those are all highlights... Not live. So my beef is with those who say that F1 can't survive without FTA live tv. Well the Premier League does it just fine...

Football is often tribal, and motorsport in general is not. Sure people have their favourites, but people don't usually base so much of their own identity around who they're a fan of.

My point is that I suspect it's much easier for the average fan to walk away from one particular motorsport series on TV compared to a football fan walking away from watching "their" team on TV in the Premier League. (As well as the fact that with football there are many more convenient opportunities to go and see a team play in various places around the country, whereas with F1 unless you're going to go abroad, there's exactly one weekend for British fans to go and see the sport in person.)

The key issue at the moment is the quality of the highlights.

F1 highlights currently are completely different to the "normal" model of sports highlights - they are very extensive - showing 80%+ of the race - and in a very good timeslot - only a few hours after the race has finished so it's easy to avoid the result. For early morning races they are in a much better slot than the actual live race.

All of the above makes the highlights (at the moment) very attractive - thus substantially diminishing the value Sky gets from its exclusive live races.

We don't know where the highlights will be from 2019 onwards - ie whether "main terrestrial" or just Pick (or quite possibly Sky 1 + Pick - ie Sky 1 for Sky EPG purposes).

But wherever the highlights are shown from 2019 they will surely be much more limited - ie a conventional 60 mins highlights show - in order to avoid diminishing the value Sky gets out of the live rights - and they are going to need to get maximum value given the amount they have paid.

Agree with all this and I would also add that the size, shape and quality of highlights will be a significant factor. A half-hour on a Monday evening is very different to an hour or more on a Sunday night with a bit of analysis and qualifying thrown in. We don't know what form highlights from 2019 will take but people are fickle. F1 grew with people watching highlights and as F1 developed the TV offering grew with it, bigger and better highlights, full live races, qualifying, free practice etc. People get used to being well-served and if it's taken away people don't easily retrench to what they had in the dim and distant, it was an another age.... and yes, they resent having to pay to see what had previously been free and that their support helped to build up.

Let me get one thing straight. I'm *not* saying that F1 *can't* survive with only highlights on FTA. I'm saying that F1 has a whole raft of problems that need sorting out. The TV offer is just one part of that, just as the UK is only one country in a big wide world (but it's a significant one in terms of audience, history and team locations). The many crucial decisions that F1 has to take in the next two or three years will be the key to *how well* it survives. TV is an important element in all of this but not the be-all-and-end-all.

F1 & highlights at this current moment in time are two words that don't go together...that is F1's biggest problem, making the sport interesting to the casual viewer.

Did you not watch last weekend's race?

And it's exactly that length and quality of highlights which Sky will be desperate to ensure is *not* available on FTA.

That's pretty much it, it's not done for the benefit of the viewers

I think it's a consciousness thing with football, in the UK anyway. It's a part of the culture. It was a part of the culture when pretty much the only things to do were work down the pits, race whippets and go to the pub for a pint (ok, I'm slightly taking the proverbial, but you know what I mean) before you had all these other mega-sports and other diversions.

It was a part of the culture before TV and TV has in ways merely enhanced that (pre-Premier League) with almost saturation-level coverage, and further enhanced whilst also detracting (post-Premier League/Sky, which has "gentrified" the game somewhat and lifted it into the stratoshpere whilst making it a bit too exclusive, in many ways).

Even post-Premier League there is still loads of other football on TV, be it FA Cups or (until relatively recently) Champions League or World Cups or highlights of the PL or the FL or Scottish games.

And if it's not on TV there's any number of top-division and lower division and even lower division and amateur and even junior games that you can go to and still remain involved in the sport. With the exception of the PL in recent years people still feel deep connections to it, clubs are part of communities, it still feels like the people's game. It's generally cheap to go to a game: follow your team and get back home in time to watch some coverage of the rest late at night. The sport kind of gets away with it in that respect: in many ways football continues to be a massive success despite pay-TV, not because of it. It's entrenched, it's almost ubiquitous.

In contrast, F1's success is built almost entirely on television. The sport only really expanded properly post the 1970's when everything became standardised and televised regularly and predictably. The sport has always engendered a distance between it and its fans because it is hyper-expensive and uber-professional and glamorous. F1 has never been and will never be "the people's sport". Doesn't mean it's better or worse, it's going to be part of the attraction. But TV is the oxygen of F1. And though it's popular (currently), it's still a relatively niche sort of popular in comparison to football. Going exclusive to Sky is going to hurt it in ways it would never hurt football.


Last weekend's race was good, but I personally don't kid myself that it was a mega epic one. To some extent it merely contained all the things you need to tick off for good coverage in the media.

Of course it wasn't exactly the greatest F1 race in the world, but it was still decent, and completely goes against all the constant "F1 is sooooo boring" tweets/messages that we see at the moment.

Actually, showing F1 in highlights form is IMO the strategy to go for when tackling the "F1 is boring" casual fans. They want to see wheel-to-wheel action all the time, when realistically, F1 will never (and has never) delivered that. But if you show them highlights (where it'll consist) of the best bits with the boring stuff cut out, then it'll give the impression that it's exciting. Even a 60mins program would be fine for me. I grew up watching the ITV highlights pretty much half the time, around 1998-2008, My mum would tape them on VHS when they'd be aired around 11PM - and i'd watch them the next day, and I never noticed a drop in quality.

You might get a few casuals that way, but I doubt the current fans that watch on FTA with half live and half extended highlights would be very impressed. It's the loss of those we need to worry about first, before trying to attract casual fans to fill the gap in my opinion.

Ive tried watching highlights on the beeb, just cant do it. Havent watched any for about 18months. Live, full rerun or nothing for me.

Yes and for a casual viewer it was a dull...no wonder the sport is losing interest, especially if you thought it was a good race. How people can now watch a full race (race used in very loose terms) is beyond me...can only appeal to the hardcore fans.

The thing is FTA is important to this sport, and this deal contains an FTA component (of which we don't know the details) whereas surely Sky would have preferred to have exclusive PayTV only rights. The Sky deal could include a minimum length that they have to make available as highlights, and as long as the audience remains there's going to be a demand for a decent length highlights show in a prime spot. It could work out better for the sport; maybe more people would watch a regular Sunday evening programme.

Cars are also a big part of our culture, and whilst you can't (or at least shouldn't) race on the road motor racing is something that has an inherent connection to a large number of people. Almost immediately after the motor car was invented somebody thought about racing them, whereas balls existed for thousands of years before anyone thought of football. (Probably).

You seem to be comparing F1 to all football, which is completely inaccurate. There's lots of other motor racing on TV, and lots of regular motor racing you can see to feel connected that never makes it on TV, just like football. I'd suggest motor racing is the second most relevant sport to most people, and whilst F1 is the pinnacle and may seem a bit elitist and out of touch it's hardly more so than the premiership.

F1 survived for years with only the odd race live and mostly highlights packages. I'm sure it can do it again - didn't stop us from getting into it, every race live is basically a modern thing and I can't understand why people think it will make a difference to the sport overall.

Which nobody watches.

I'm sure F1 will survive this move to pay tv (other factors are far more likely to kill it off) but it became one of the biggest sports on TV because it was FTA, indeed it was one of the first to embrace putting everything live on FTA. Now maybe you don't think being one of the biggest TV sports is that important, fair enough, but I think it is and it's a shame F1 has turned its back on what made it so big and is embracing the MotoGP model of being followed a hardcore fanbase but with very little interest from the wider public.

This is the crux, no-one knows what form the highlights will take, so all the hyberbole from people is rather premature.

However, in rough terms Sky is paying three times the current amount for its coverage from 2019. How do they expect to recover this? Do they expect three times as many additional subscribers as SSF1 has existing viewers? Charge three times the current subscription rate? Show three times as many adverts? Charge the advertisers three times the current rates? Slash production costs by two-thirds? Obviously it'll be a mixture but even so....

One assumes that they currently make a profit showing F1 on the current terms, so you'd expect they'd want to make a greater (or at least equivalent) profit with the new terms. Why would they want to make less? To keep making a profit they need people paying to watch their exclusive live coverage, not an FTA offering that satisfies the needs of lots of fans and casual viewers alike?

If Sky is making a profit of £1x now, why would they do a deal to increase their costs by three times and potentially make less profit or even a loss? Spend £40m pa and make £1x now or spend £150m pa and perhaps make a profit of £0.5x? Okay, so perhaps it can be cross-subsidised by football or other channels but the unknown question is have they overpaid for F1.... and have they overpaid for football as well?

What has Sky achieved? They've potentially made it harder to make a decent profit from showing F1 but on the other hand, they've kept it away from BT Sport. So Sky has content but at what cost to themselves, the fans and the sport? Somehow I don't imagine that BT Sport is losing too much sleep over it.

Only five years ago Ecclestone said that going behind a paywall would be "suicidal". Not sure what's caused him to do one of his famous u-turns. £££££££. Greed over suicide? Perhaps he's found a way to take it with him?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/mot...-suicidal.html

I was suggesting Bernie had insisted on the FTA component of the deal, acting in response to the minimum that the teams want, and that's reason for optimism that the highlights will be worthwhile. Sky obviously wouldn't want FTA anything.

But yes the whole deal seems a bit strange to me. I'd have thought if anything Sky have been disappointed with the ratings for F1 and would look to pay less. Maybe they really are so terrified of BT they're prepared to take a huge loss.


Blame the BBC. They reneged on the deal (twice). Nobody likes being forced to take a pay cut.

Well D.M.N. has reported that the original proposal for 2016-2018 was that Sky would just show all the races live & C4 would just have highlights, however the teams veto'd that and insisted that the current split should remain. Of course, that was under the 2016-2018 financial terms - which would be (one assumes) cheaper than what Sky were offering for 2019 onwards. So now that Sky have offered more money, that'll offset the team's worries about not being able to get as much money due to the less exposure.... If that makes sense.

What would be the financially worse thing for Sky to do, pay a bit more for F1 (and in the grand scheme of things £175m per year isn't that much) or let BT have it? Going big probably the lesser of two evils for them.

There is a clash this weekend between the Formula E race in Long Island and the Bahrain Formula 1 Grand Prix. Jack has tweeted he's on his way to Bahrain and wished his FE colleagues well. No idea who will replace him or if he'll commentate down the line or if he plans to rack up the air miles.