BBC drops half of F1 coverage

Obviously the sponsors will be very disappointed if loads of UK Formula 1 fans stop watching their TVs!

The sponsors will quickly realise that if so many UK fans are so uninvolved with Formula 1 that they're too mean even to pay for the core viewing experience, that they've simply been wasting a lot of time and effort trying to persuade those same "devoted fans" to buy into the sponsoring products' "share of heart".

Luckily there are other fast growing global markets that are already far more important for them.
 
vtecsilver said:
I'm not paying any money to Sky TV, so will have to give up on watching F1 just as it was getting good, and settling down on BBC again. Makes me wonder why I pay to watch live BBC TV, as there are fewer and fewer live broadcasts that I consider worth watching - iplayer (recorded shows) option seems a more attractive option.
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So - basically - you just want TV shows for free, and aren't prepared to pay for them to be made at all if you can avoid it. How is the BBC ultimately going to make those shows and put them on a server for you to download for free. :cuckoo: :cuckoo: :cuckoo: If you want something, pay for it - be it a decent photograph of your wedding or a close-up of some tennis-player's arse... :help::nono:

It costs a fortune to go and see any sport live, let alone top-rank sport, so £20-odd per month is a bargain by comparision, especially when you look at the huge range of sport they give - football in every possible flavour, boxing, motor racing, golf, tennis, and tons more.

Sky does not release any audience figures, even internally. But it will put on an obscure minority sport from the other side of the world, live at 3am, with full studio production, in HD / 3D, compared to the BBC who might put the results on their website 2 days later... and sky are happy to make a program that has a (probably) tiny audience as it adds-up overall, whereas bbc/itv/c4 pull the plug on anything that goes under 1m...


Anyway, F1 stopped being interesting many years ago when it became nothing more than a parade of mobile advertising hordeings going round in circles, with 0.1 second differences in tyre changes supposedly being interesting :gag: :thinking:
 
I wouldn't pay £20 per month for F1 even though I really enjoy it. I would watch the BBC ones live and the others in highlights BUT some people clearly would it's their choice. Luckily one of my kids, who is paying for his own multiroom in his bedroom, has decided that he will pay the extra for Sky Sports so he can watch the football :D Result..... (Luckily for him it is only £10 per month as we already have films!)

I would have possibly gone down the RTL via Eutelsat route with Radio 5 for the commentary.
 
flossie said:
So - basically - you just want TV shows for free, and aren't prepared to pay for them to be made at all if you can avoid it. How is the BBC ultimately going to make those shows and put them on a server for you to download for free. :cuckoo: :cuckoo: :cuckoo: If you want something, pay for it - be it a decent photograph of your wedding or a close-up of some tennis-player's arse... :help::nono:

It costs a fortune to go and see any sport live, let alone top-rank sport, so £20-odd per month is a bargain by comparision, especially when you look at the huge range of sport they give - football in every possible flavour, boxing, motor racing, golf, tennis, and tons more.

Sky does not release any audience figures, even internally. But it will put on an obscure minority sport from the other side of the world, live at 3am, with full studio production, in HD / 3D, compared to the BBC who might put the results on their website 2 days later... and sky are happy to make a program that has a (probably) tiny audience as it adds-up overall, whereas bbc/itv/c4 pull the plug on anything that goes under 1m...


Anyway, F1 stopped being interesting many years ago when it became nothing more than a parade of mobile advertising hordeings going round in circles, with 0.1 second differences in tyre changes supposedly being interesting :gag: :thinking:
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No its not. Over £400 per annum for something we were told was guaranteed to be free to air until at least 2018?? How is that a bargain???! Its not a bargain by any stretch of the imagination, especially as you're also paying for stuff you don't want.

F1 has been free since the very first time it aired on TV. Our TV licence fee, as a BBC programme, paid for our viewing. Why should we pay an additional £400+ per annum to watching something that has been free to air because suddenly Bernie needs more money and the BBC need to save. Great, works for them but who suffers? Us faithful F1 fans. Its akin to putting the world cup on Sky and only showing half the games on terrestrial tv, (not comparing this toUK football as it is on Sky at the moment as its just the UK championships so they are only national games), as F1 is a worldwide championship. If they put the World Cup on Sky and charged people £400+ to watch it there'd be complete uproar!

And your last paragraph, clearly you havnt watched F1 this year!
 
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I agree with the above. Its true F1 fans that are going to suffer
 
Why is everyone is talking as if the only way of seeing a GP next year will be on Sky :shrug:

If you don't have / want a Sky sport subscription you will still be able to see EVERY race on the BBC. (Bernie has said that the beeb will show every race in it's entirety). OK half of them won't be live broadcast but come on, I'm sure a lot of people record the race and watch it after the event anyway. Certainly the one's that are on at silly o'clock in the morning.
 
A recorded race is not the same as a live race. Die hard fans will always watch it live.
 
cam1986 said:
A recorded race is not the same as a live race. Die hard fans will always watch it live.
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I consider myself a die hard fan ;) I absolutely love F1, but for one reason or another I can't watch every race in a season live and I'm sure it's the same for many :)
 
Grendel said:
I consider myself a die hard fan ;) I absolutely love F1, but for one reason or another I can't watch every race in a season live and I'm sure it's the same for many :)
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Are you following me around :D
 
Watching the race later is ok if it's an hour or two later not the next day. We will have to wait and see what they mean by later. But I for one will not be giving a penny to Sky/Murdock as I don't watch any other sport except moto gp, so it would work out at £20 per race watched on Sky + any setup fees.
 
Yves Geza said:
Obviously the sponsors will be very disappointed if loads of UK Formula 1 fans stop watching their TVs!

The sponsors will quickly realise that if so many UK fans are so uninvolved with Formula 1 that they're too mean even to pay for the core viewing experience, that they've simply been wasting a lot of time and effort trying to persuade those same "devoted fans" to buy into the sponsoring products' "share of heart".

Luckily there are other fast growing global markets that are already far more important for them.
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I doubt that this will even register as far as the sponsors are concerned. In terms of the total F1 audience the UK is a very small fish in a rather large pond. Most of the sponsors are world wide corporates, and, as you say, have global markets way more important than that of the the UK, so a decline in the UK's viewing figures is unlikely to have that much effect on sponsorship decisions.

I'll be honest in that even though I can get BBC F1 coverage here, I've taken to watching the German coverage instead - more info, less fluff. So the switch to sky is pretty much of a non event for me. Of course that doesn't help you guys though.
 
odd jim said:
No its not. Over £400 per annum for something we were told was guaranteed to be free to air until at least 2018?? How is that a bargain???!
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Its a bargain compared to going to see the races in person.
Its a bargain because you get tons and tons of other sport on top of your tedious high-speed version of the M25 at rush hour.

You complain about having to pay for one specific sport and getting loads of others included. 5 entire channels dedicated to 24 hours of sport, showing everything in full, instead of a few hours of mixed-up coverage of a bunch of sports on weekend afternoons, with the occasional event in full...

odd jim said:
Its not a bargain by any stretch of the imagination, especially as you're also paying for stuff you don't want.
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But that's exactly the same as the licence fee - you pay for the whole lot, and get lots of mass-market programming you aren't interested in. Non-sports fans have to pay for the World Cup and Wimbledon, Pensioners pay for Childrens shows, let alone all the Daytime tv for the unemployed, or the endless stream of Dancing shows. I can't remember when I last watched anything shown on BBC-1 or BBC-3 for example... but I still pay for my licence fee because there's some stuff on BBC-2 and 4 that's great.

odd jim said:
F1 has been free since the very first time it aired on TV. Our TV licence fee, as a BBC programme, paid for our viewing. Why should we pay an additional £400+ per annum to watching something that has been free to air because suddenly Bernie needs more money and the BBC need to save. Great, works for them but who suffers? Us faithful F1 fans.
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"faithful" fans will put their hands in their pockets instead of expecting stuff for free. Its still cheaper than going down the pub for one afternoon. People who were watching it just because its on will find something else to stare at. The complaining about stuff being slightly more expensive just makes people sound like a spoilt child, its not good...

odd jim said:
Its akin to putting the world cup on Sky and only showing half the games on terrestrial tv, (not comparing this toUK football as it is on Sky at the moment as its just the UK championships so they are only national games), as F1 is a worldwide championship. If they put the World Cup on Sky and charged people £400+ to watch it there'd be complete uproar!
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If they did, you'd get to see every single match though, not just the England ones. Just as the Champions League coverage is far far greater on Sky than ITV. Think about that... And anyway, I hate football, why should my licence fee go towards supporting the incredible corruption of FIFA?


Anyway, you can't expect logic to be found at the BBC nowadays when it comes to money, an organisation that spent £800m on a political move to Manchester to buildings owned by someone else and closing the best studio facilities in the world that they owned themselves :cuckoo:.
 
flossie said:
Its a bargain compared to going to see the races in person.
Its a bargain because you get tons and tons of other sport on top of your tedious high-speed version of the M25 at rush hour.

You complain about having to pay for one specific sport and getting loads of others included. 5 entire channels dedicated to 24 hours of sport, showing everything in full, instead of a few hours of mixed-up coverage of a bunch of sports on weekend afternoons, with the occasional event in full...

But that's exactly the same as the licence fee - you pay for the whole lot, and get lots of mass-market programming you aren't interested in. Non-sports fans have to pay for the World Cup and Wimbledon, Pensioners pay for Childrens shows, let alone all the Daytime tv for the unemployed, or the endless stream of Dancing shows. I can't remember when I last watched anything shown on BBC-1 or BBC-3 for example... but I still pay for my licence fee because there's some stuff on BBC-2 and 4 that's great.

"faithful" fans will put their hands in their pockets instead of expecting stuff for free. Its still cheaper than going down the pub for one afternoon. People who were watching it just because its on will find something else to stare at. The complaining about stuff being slightly more expensive just makes people sound like a spoilt child, its not good...

If they did, you'd get to see every single match though, not just the England ones. Just as the Champions League coverage is far far greater on Sky than ITV. Think about that... And anyway, I hate football, why should my licence fee go towards supporting the incredible corruption of FIFA?

Anyway, you can't expect logic to be found at the BBC nowadays when it comes to money, an organisation that spent £800m on a political move to Manchester to buildings owned by someone else and closing the best studio facilities in the world that they owned themselves :cuckoo:.
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Sorry. None of that washes with me.

You clearly hate f1, and love Rupert Murdocks media machine of which I want nothing to do with. I therefore wouldn't expect you to understand our argument, or feelings towards this.

Youre right about the BBC though, bunch of idiots.
 
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odd jim said:
Youre right about the BBC though, bunch of idiots.
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How are they idiots? They have kept coverage but cut costs, seems like they have done the best they could. They could quite easily gone "we can't afford it" and sky would have it all.
 
Jimmy_Lemon said:
How are they idiots? They have kept coverage but cut costs, seems like they have done the best they could. They could quite easily gone "we can't afford it" and sky would have it all.
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Because they committed to something they couldn't afford. That to me is pretty stupid and at the very least, incompetent and short sighted.

The original deal with the BBC had a few more years left to run, let's not forget that.
 
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The BBC have dealt the F1 fans a big blow. They have sold out to sky. Many won't like to watch it 2nd hand and many won't be able to afford to pay skys high price.
 
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odd jim said:
Because try committed to something they couldn't afford. That to me is pretty stupid and at the very least, incompetent and short sighted.

The original deal with the BBC had a few more years left to run, let's not forget that.
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afaik it has one year left, and I haven't seen any details saying if it was the BBC's choice to end it early....it might have been said, but I haven't seen it anywhere.
 
Jimmy_Lemon said:
afaik it has one year left, and I haven't seen any details saying if it was the BBC's choice to end it early....it might have been said, but I haven't seen it anywhere.
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No, it had two more years left to run, and the BBC actually introduced sky executives to Bernie Ecclestone to broker the deal.

The fact is the BBC bit off more than they could chew.
 
Jimmy_Lemon said:
Then more fool them.
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Its the principle of it though. If enough vote with thier remote and don't watch it i am sure something would have to be done. The UK has a massive following. A lot of the teams are based here too. There is uproar over this all over the net.
 
Grendel said:
Why is everyone is talking as if the only way of seeing a GP next year will be on Sky :shrug:

If you don't have / want a Sky sport subscription you will still be able to see EVERY race on the BBC. (Bernie has said that the beeb will show every race in it's entirety). OK half of them won't be live broadcast but come on, I'm sure a lot of people record the race and watch it after the event anyway. Certainly the one's that are on at silly o'clock in the morning.
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Yeah and whats the betting that all the live races on BBC will be the ones that are on at silly o'clock :thumbs:
 
odd jim said:
Sorry. None of that washes with me.

You clearly hate f1, and love Rupert Murdocks media machine of which I want nothing to do with. I therefore wouldn't expect you to understand our argument, or feelings towards this.
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Ah, sorry, I thought this conversation might be about logic not irrational emotions...silly me.
 
flossie said:
Ah, sorry, I thought this conversation might be about logic not irrational emotions...silly me.
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It is, what are you inferring? What exactly am I saying that is irrational?

You have one side of the argument which is anti F1 and pro sky, the other side of the argument which I hold is fanatical about F1 and anti exclusion. There will be lots of disappointed people out there who simply can't afford to pay for sky. It's all well and good those saying "if you love f1 you'll pay for it" but for some fans that's not an option.

That's not difficult to understand surely?

And I for one, feel wholly let down by the BBC who told us we would have at least until the 2014 season until to free to air deal ended.
 
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It's a bit unsure as to whether the whole race will be aired delayed. Apparently the show will be 75 mins long, obviously that can't show the whole race as races tend to be at least 90 minutes long.
 
Schuette said:
It's a bit unsure as to whether the whole race will be aired delayed. Apparently the show will be 75 mins long, obviously that can't show the whole race as races tend to be at least 90 minutes long.
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As far as I understand it, 10 races live and the rest will be as extended highlights on the BBC. Sky will show every race live though
 
starkersclark said:
As far as I understand it, 10 races live and the rest will be as extended highlights on the BBC. Sky will show every race live though
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Yeah that's what I meant, the ones it doesn't show live there is some uncertainty over whether they will be highlights or a full race rerun.
 
flossie said:
Ah, sorry, I thought this conversation might be about logic not irrational emotions...silly me.
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As someone who has, obviously, little or no interest in f1, your opinion - while it may be valid, serves no other purpose in this debate other than to wind people-up.

The fact is these people feel let down by both the BBC, and the f1 teams who supposedly signed an agreement that the 'sport' should be free to air.

While that agreement is in theory still in place as TV license payers they are entitled to their view - like you.
 
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Football fans have long had to dodge the results of the day (and sometimes for days in the case of mid-week matches) so as to not to spoil the weekend Match of the Day, Match of the Day 2 and the Football League Show. If the BBC are happy to only show highlights of the nation's - and the world's - favourite sport, and arguably the best league of said sport in the world, I'm amazed that F1 fans are surprised to find their sport heading the same way.

I'm a massive sports fan, there's little I won't watch if it's on (darts, bowls and horse racing being the only ones that spring to mind) and personally I'd love to see a huge amount of the BBC's budget go towards sports coverage instead of putting pillocks like Clarkson on huge salaries for the same old weekly drivel but sadly the BBC has an obligation to provide broadcasting coverage to satisfy as much of the British public as possible. Unfortunately this means that they tend to spread themselves thin over a very wide area rather than giving real indulgence to a single focus.

The root of the problem is the broken funding mechanism that the BBC has continued to rely on for decades despite the huge transitions made in the way that people receive BBC productions - I tried to find the year the TV Licence started but couldn't find anything conclusively, certainly pre-1971 though.

I know of a considerable number of people who don't own a TV Licence and rely solely on BBC iPlayer (and the equivalent of other channels) for their TV, and do so completely within the law. It's become so easy to legally access their content through non-traditional means (read; computers) that they need to re-think a payment structure which actually closes the loop-holes and charges ALL viewers/listeners/readers of BBC output. People CAN'T expect the BBC to be a free service. Producing news, tv, radio etc. comes at a huge cost and it's about time that they moved away from the broken system of TV Licensing and considered alternative means that actually covered usage, and so costs, far more equitably for the general public.

As a side note; I don't pay for Sky and doubt I ever will although I do wish I could see more football than just highlights, and sporadic UEFA, Europa and FA coverage. The BBC's coverage of the World Cup proved they could provide excellent, comprehensive coverage of major sporting events - albeit with ITV playing a minor broadcasting role. It's just a shame that the commentating lacked real quality; Mick McCarthy's contributions were absolutely shocking!
 
News Corporation, which owns 39 per cent of BSkyB, is said to be trying to put together a consortium to buy Formula 1 from CVC Capital Partners.
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That'll be the last nail in the coffin for the sport on terrestrial tv
 
As an F1 fan this move upsets me and I for one won't be paying to watch it on sky sports they get enough of my cash each month and sky sports just ain't worth the extra IMHO, I guess I'll just find an illegal stream to watch when the needs arise.

However I can understand why the BBC wouldn't want to spend vast amounts of cash on a show that just don't get the viewing figures people on here are saying it get's, if you have a look at the figures posted for our very own home race you get just 4.9 million viewers for that race, the race comes 15th on the list of BBC programes for that week, not the mass appeal that people seem to think it is, the first 4 races of the season didn't even come in the top 30 programes on the BBC when they ran.
 
The recent Sky profits shows that they are doing something right.

To make that level of profit in the current economic climate is a super achievement.

People are happy to pay for quality and there can be no doubt that is what they do and will deliver.

I am happy that Sky have confirmed that the races will have no advert breaks in them, in a similar way to the coverage of the masters when each break was limited to 60 seconds and controlled in number; for me this was more than acceptable.

I know a lot of poeple do not like Sky for various reasons, News Intl etc. For me it is quite simple - I pay Sky to watch top quality sports coverage - I do not care who owns it, runs it or benefits from it; this matters not a bit to me - I just want to watch the sport.

In the current climate this will become more and more common - You will have to pay to watch a lot more decent tv and sport as the bbc struggles to compete due to the way they choose to spend the licence payers money. £900 million to relocate the sports department to Salford; cannot see in my eyes how that is a good use of the money.
 
more details came out on this, apparently the BBC will provide the commentating team, and share the race feed with sky for all races, so if sky provide onsite services, the Beeb provide Brundle/Coulthard/Kravitz/Jiggles (assuming they resign) but presenters will be Sky or Beeb depending on race. I guess the BBC ones would be in studio to save cash
 
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