Fox Sports has completed the motorsport set with the acquisition of Formula One rights from this season, leaving Network Ten with the scraps and Australian motorsport fans in search for a spare $50 to sign up for pay TV.
Those with Foxtel are the big winners of the deal. Like with V8 Supercars and MotoGP, every session of the Formula One season will be live and in high-definition, while Ten simulcasts just 10 races live and the rest on big delays in a highlights package form, a similar arrangement to the United Kingdom rights model.
Meanwhile, those without Foxtel need to accept that the current Australian media landscape necessitates such a move, as motorsport simply follows the path of the AFL, NRL and most other sporting codes
Ten could not continue to afford Formula One on its own at a time when it’s in such financial strife, Nine has not shown an interest in motorsport since letting go of Formula One in 2002, and Seven is backing out of motorsport after handing over the V8 Supercars rights following 2014.
When Network Ten gave up on the all-sports ONE HD platform, it was only a matter of time before free-to-air networks lost the battle with Fox Sports for high-end sports television rights.
While motorsport received a stay of execution as Ten persisted with Formula One, including live qualifying, Fox Sports was bound to move in. It was determined to fill its motorsport content when it had a dedicated motorsport channel in SpeedTV Australia, which fell victim to the parent channel’s closure in the USA but left a motorsport legacy at the pay-television network.
The timing of the Formula One move is interesting. While on the one hand the sport’s competitiveness has suffered from the manufacturer arm’s race of the new engine formula and financial crisis among the teams, Aussies have a rising star in Daniel Ricciardo, who will be a feature in the series for years to come.
Given the latter, Australian motorsport’s penetration into the mainstream will suffer as a result of the pay-television move, especially Formula One in contrast to V8 Supercars.
V8 Supercars’ free-to-air component includes live coverage of the six major events, which makes of 70 per cent of the television viewership for the series, and same-day delays in regular afternoon and evening timeslots for the rest of the championship. This means consistent timeslots on the same channel, as opposed to the irregular start times and regular channel shifts of the previous deal with Channel Seven.
Formula One’s free-to-air component, aside from the 10 live events, includes one-hour highlights packages on ONE HD the following Monday at an undisclosed time; a far bigger delay than what V8 Supercars fans will have to put with.
In an age when it’s so easy to follow live sporting events away from television it will be interesting to see how these delayed telecasts rate.
But while V8 Supercars retains a bigger free-to-air presence than the likes of the AFL and NRL, where most matches can only be seen on Fox Sports, Formula One could struggle to retain mainstream interest.
In the end though, this deal merely shadows what other sports have done. Free-to-air has channelled its sporting interests into just a few events and codes, just as Fox Sports has filled up its channels.
Australia has now well and truly moved to a pay-television dominated model for sports. On the surface, free-to-air viewers are the big losers. But without Fox Sports, most international sports, including Formula One, could be lost to viewers entirely.
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