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Formula One needs a back-up plan if the BBC bites the dust

26th November, 2015
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Formula One is in desperate need of a strategy dream team. (Photo by Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)
Expert
26th November, 2015
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If I were insane, I could’ve stayed awake until 5am and watched the entirety of the WEC finale online for ‎€5 (or approximately A$1,000 at current exchange rates), a small cost to pay to see Mark Webber crowned champion in Porsche.

For just 50 euro cents more per race I could have bought coverage of the entire MotoGP season to watch Jorge Lorenzo clinch the title over teammate Valentino Rossi (or if in Italy, read: see Marc Marquez rob Rossi of the championship).

Even Formula E, which placed its season finale in the hands of the terrifyingly bureaucratic Wandsworth Council Community Services Overview and Scrutiny Committee this week and survived, makes available a live video stream to fans in regions without television coverage.

That makes three of Formula One’s motorsport contemporaries doing little more than what Karl Stefanovic once did drunk after the Logies – broadcast themselves in moving pictures – on the internet, a medium so apparently accessible that it is dominated mostly by cat videos.

Until now Formula One’s affinity for the fax machine and reluctance to be more than a bit-player online has merely been humorous decoration around an apparently sound business juggernaut, but the BBC’s unsuccessful attempt to renegotiate its already lightweight broadcast rights package with Bernie Ecclestone has shaded the situation more seriously.

If the BBC absolves itself of its broadcasting obligations, Formula One will be the loser, and not because Formula One management may lose a paying customer. Despite the sport receiving a direct cash injection from pay television, free-to-air remains critical to the sport’s viewership, and therefore its buying power.

To bolster against pay TV’s generally poor take-up figures in most parts of the world, share deals like those between Network Ten and Fox Sports or BBC and Sky Sports F1, have been taken up, but highlight only how unprepared the public is to fork out for a subscription service. In the UK, for example, the BBC’s coverage of the Brazilian Grand Prix averaged 4.02 million viewers while Sky Sports Formula One managed just 548,000.

Take away the free-to-air coverage in Britain and Formula One would have scarcely more eyeballs than Australia’s Gogglebox, a truly chilling statistic.

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The solution, as realised by so many other sports, is that Formula One could have its cake and eat it too if it looked yonder to online streaming.

To tell viewers that they cannot watch Formula One unless they pay Rupert Murdoch or other relevant media moguls for the privilege, as is Formula One’s current wont, is absurd. When the viewer realises their $50 monthly bill is subsidising a host of nothing-content, like E! TV, they realise their return on investment is poor and leave the service – and Formula One – forever.

Offer an online subscription service directly to the viewer at a reasonable price, however, and the justification is easier to make.

The technology is so painfully within reach, yet Formula One insists on that most frustrating and misinformed business practice of refusing to take our money no matter how hard we plead with them.

Some have drawn parallels with Bernie’s 1996 investment in Formula One Digital+, a satellite-based precursor to the sort of multiscreen experience we have now, saying that it burnt him when it didn’t make enough to cover its roughly $250 million price tag for nine of its years of operation. It would certainly explain why it took the sport until 2011 to hitch a ride on the high-definition TV bandwagon or until this year to activate a full array of social media channels, at very least.

Whichever way you cut it, it seems Formula One has become reluctant to make an initial infrastructure investment without evidence of an immediate financial return, and this doubly so if the infrastructure is digital.

Formula1.com, launched only this year, is evidence of this. Despite promising in March to allow a premium subscription bought on a phone to be transferable to the desktop website and vice versa, it attempted to bill users for two subscriptions until two weeks ago if they wanted both. And for a period of months the array of clocks couldn’t accurately identify what time a race would start in your local time zone.

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Both problems are easily rectified – Candy Crush has inter-platform connectivity and the watch was invented in 1770 – but, as has been the case with almost anything internet-related, with the exception of the business of taking down YouTube videos, Formula One has been slow to the party.

Such tardiness in the coming weeks could prove costly, however, with the BBC threatening to vaporise a significant portion of Formula One’s audience as quickly as one might change the channel.

Ironically enough, the BBC is having its funding cut because of its inability to negotiate the integration of iPlayer, the BBC’s on-demand video service, into its licence fee funding model, burning a significant hole in its pocket.

It’s a cautionary tale for failing to keep ahead of the game. Will Formula One heed the warning, or will it stubbornly risk its audience on an outdated model already letting it down?

Follow @MichaelLamonato on Twitter during the season-ending #AbuDhabIGP weekend.

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