Sky Sports F1 to screen Thursday Press Conference live on channel

From this weekend, Sky Sports F1 will be screening the Thursday press conferences live on their channel. For the first four races, the press conference were only uploaded to the Sky Sports website, but it seems that it shall be airing live at 14:00 on Thursday with repeats later that day.

UPDATE: I wrote the above last night when I first spotted it. Having checked the website and Sky Sports F1’s Twitter, it turns out that the press conference was not uploaded to the website for Australia and Malaysia, but was uploaded for the last two rounds in China and Bahrain. I assume they’ve brought in a few hits to the website, hence why they’ve decided to put it on the channel. A good move, in my opinion, as live action is always better than repeats. As it turns out, all that would have been on air tomorrow at 14:00 was the ‘Your Home of Formula One’ rolling loop, so it was a no brainer.

Scheduling: The Spanish Grand Prix

This weekend the Formula 1 roadshow, along with the GP2 and GP3 Series, moves onto Europe, with round 5 taking place at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. Both BBC and Sky Sports are live this weekend for the second time this season. Here’s how the schedule shapes up:

Thursday 10th May
14:00 to 14:30 – F1: Press Conference (Sky Sports F1)

Friday 11th May
08:45 to 10:50 – F1: Practice 1 (Sky Sports F1)
08:55 to 10:35 – F1: Practice 1 (BBC Red Button)
10:55 to 11:35 – GP2: Practice (Sky Sports F1)
12:45 to 14:50 – F1: Practice 2 (Sky Sports F1)
12:55 to 14:35 – F1: Practice 2 (BBC Red Button)
14:55 to 15:35 – GP2: Qualifying (Sky Sports F1)
17:00 to 18:00 – The F1 Show (Sky Sports F1)

Saturday 12th May
08:40 to 09:20 – GP3: Qualifying (Sky Sports F1)
09:45 to 11:15 – F1: Practice 3 (Sky Sports F1)
09:55 to 11:05 – F1: Practice 3 (BBC Red Button)
12:00 to 14:35 – F1: Qualifying (Sky Sports F1)
12:10 to 14:15 – F1: Qualifying (BBC One)
14:35 to 16:00 – GP2: Race 1 (Sky Sports F1)
16:15 to 17:10 – GP3: Race 1 (Sky Sports F1)

Sunday 13th May
08:20 to 09:15 – GP3: Race 2 (Sky Sports F1)
09:30 to 10:35 – GP2: Race 2 (Sky Sports F1)
11:30 to 16:30 – F1: Race (Sky Sports F1)
12:10 to 15:15 – F1: Race (BBC One)
15:15 to 16:15 – F1: Forum (BBC Red Button)
16:30 to 17:30 – F1: Legends: John Surtees (Sky Sports F1)

As expected, Sky Sports are not planning to add presentation to the GP2 or GP3 Series for the European rounds and it seems are (like with GP2 in Malaysia and Bahrain) only taking the World Feed coverage, with commentary from Will Buxton and Jerome d’Ambrosio. As reported on this blog last month, Johnny Herbert will be back with the Sky Sports F1 team for Spain through to Britain.

UPDATE on 9th May: Have added the Thursday Press Conference to the schedule above.

How much airtime F1 Digital+ had back ten years ago

One thing that I very briefly noted in part 3 of ‘The Verdict so Far’ series was F1 Digital+’s airtime and how long they were on-air before and after practice sessions for their lone season in the UK back in 2002, which I thought would make for an interesting summary in a short blog.

Using a European race as the template, you can see F1 Digital+’s on-air times here, with the European race schedule, for this case Belgium here.

For Friday’s, F1 Digital+ stayed live for the entire day, although the gap between practice sessions was must smaller than what it was now. They were on-air for four hours, with the drivers’ on track for two x 1 hour sessions. As a result, they had half an hour build-up, a gap of approximately one hour in the middle with half an hour of analysis afterwards. On Saturday’s, the two morning practice sessions were 45 minutes each, with a half an hour gap in the middle. Again, F1 Digital+ had half an hour of build-up, and and half an hour of analysis afterwards.

Moving onto Qualifying and the Race however, the airtime was similar to that of ITV F1. For Qualifying they, like with practice, had half an hour of build-up and half an hour of analysis. ITV F1 in the middle of their contract had 30 minutes of build-up for Qualifying (after initially only having 20 minutes of Qualifying build-up for 1997 through to 1999), with 20 minutes approximately of analysis.

F1 Digital+’s warm-up programme on Sunday mornings was two and a half hours, although this is due to the Porsche Supercup, but the build-up is again longer than what Sky Sports F1 have for their practice sessions. For the race, F1 Digital+ had similar on-air length to that of ITV for the pre-show, but like with Qualifying their analysis after the Race was more comprehensive than ITV F1, with F1 Digital+ not going off-air until 15:30 (significantly later than ITV F1 at most races). Of course, F1 Digital+ was only experienced by ten thousand viewers at most per race, the highest figure being twenty five thousand viewers for the 2002 Malaysian Grand Prix. The rest of the three and a half million viewers had to put up with the ITV F1 service, which I shall look at briefly mid-week.

Why Sky Sports F1’s mid-week programming needs a rethink: The Verdict so Far

The Verdict series continues with my fourth of fifth posts to begin my F1 Broadcasting blog, which will focus on F1 broadcasting in the UK as well as wide issues. There will be be occasional posts about the racing as well, but for the moment I shall dive into my fourth out of five posts concerning The Verdict. The first two posts focussed on the strengths and weaknesses of the BBC F1 and Sky Sports F1 team members, whilst my third post looked at the product that Sky Sports F1 puts out each weekend while on location at each track. This post will continue to look at Sky Sports F1, but looking at their content during the week.

One of the major challenges for Sky Sports F1 once the channel was announced last November was “how do we fill the hours?”. The hours during the weekend fill themselves with the live F1, GP2 and GP3 action. The hours during the week however, do not fill themselves and instead Sky have to fill material themselves with their own programming. At the moment this is what Sky Sports F1 has during the week and on the off-weekends:

– F1 Fast Track: 30-minute highlights of 2012 races so far set to a backing track
– Weekend in Words: 1-hour compilation of clips of people talking from the previous race weekend
– Weekend in Stills: 30-minute compilation of images from the previous race weekend
– The F1 Show: see my description in Part 3
– Season Reviews: reviews from 1988 to 2011, most taken from the official DVD season reviews

The problem is that Sky are focusing their programming in the wrong areas. As a dedicated fan, who watches the majority of things, only The F1 Show and the Season Reviews appeal for me. The casual fan is more likely to watch F1 Fast Track and the ‘Weekend in…’ programmes (although Weekend in Stills admittedly caters to both), however are casual fans likely to watch the Sky Sports F1 channel during the week? Not really. It would be in Sky’s interest to focus more on the dedicated fan during the week and non-F1 weekends by putting on programmes that appeal to them as they are the core audience for the channel during that time period. Official figures from BARB showed that the highest rated programmes between the Malaysian and Chinese Grand Prix weekends had 44,000 viewers and 57,000 viewers for The F1 Show on Friday evenings, a small pocket of the audience. The channel during these two weeks reached 142,000 viewers and 102,000 viewers per day, again, a small portion of the audience, and most likely a dedicated contingent. If you’re churning out the same programmes day in-day out, where’s the incentive to watch? I can’t see any. For Sky, they should at least be aiming to produce programme for the dedicated audience, but also accessible for the casual audience.

The current programming does not do that. F1 Fast Track is a waste of half an hour of airtime and is nothing more than ‘filler’ which should be dumped. Weekend in Words serves no purpose either, and is twice as worse seeing as it is 1 hour long. Half of the quotes are outdated, and as the dedicated audience would have watched the majority of programming this programme is effectively repeating the same interviews that the viewer has already seen during the main weekend coverage. This programme, again, does nothing for me and should be dumped.

Weekend in Stills is okay and should stay. I can see why people would enjoy this programme, and while it is not my cup of tea, images capture a lot more than what TV images can, so it is probably worth keeping. The F1 Show I shall skim over here, because I’ve already stated multiple times that I believe this is the best piece of TV that Sky Sports F1 produce, so I hope to see this a staple in the schedule. The Season Reviews is a bugbear. Yes, dedicated fans would like it. But why not full races? The thing I don’t like here is that Sky went back on what they said on their Twitter account before the season. Given that this is a dedicated channel, I find the decision to not broadcast full, classic races bizarre. Showing Season Reviews is a step back from the BBC’s fantastic Classic F1 offering between 2009 to 2011 where readers would get a choice of five races and they would get to pick the best for an extended highlights offering, see here as an example. The writer on the blog, Andrew Benson admitted I believe that the Classic F1 series was basically done ‘off a piece of string’, yet they appear to have put in more effort in this area than Sky so far.

I make it sound like this is a ‘big deal’, but it seems a sensible thing to do considering it is easy hours of material to fill on their channel instead of another repeat. Some of you may be wondering whether Sky Sports would actually have the rights to the material. I think they would have the rights to the majority of the material (and commentary) considering it is filmed, and recorded, inside the confines of a race circuit, so that is not an excuse. My overriding opinion is that it’s disappointing for Sky not to exploit the rights. Why both with a dedicated channel if you’re not going to run archive races during non-F1 weekends?

The other programming, is too weak for an F1 channel, in that there should be more. The following is some simple ideas of programming aside from replaying Classic F1 races, which are as follows:

Radio Soundbites
– 1 hour
– The best team radio soundbites from the weekend
– containing clips from the World Feed and also the Pit Channel

Cockpit View
– 1 hour
– The best onboard moments from the weekend
– containing clips from the World Feed and also the Onboard Channel

Hybrid
– 1 hour
– a Hybrid race feed containing the best bits from the World Feed, Onboard and Pitlane with Team Radio and Natural Sounds over the top

The Paddock View Live
– 30 minutes (or 1 hour depending on race ‘excitement’)
– two or three F1 journalists in a studio looking at newspapers and opinion pieces, agreeing or disagreeing
– also asking for viewers opinion

Fanzone
– 30 minutes
– a few dedicated fans in the studio, preferably straight after The F1 Show with the viewpoints being ‘handed over’ to the fans for them to give their thoughts
– also asking for viewers opinion

And how would all of that, including the existing programming and full classic races instead of Season Reviews? Like this…

Mondays
19:00 – Race (repeat)

Tuesdays
20:00 – Weekend in Words
21:00 – F1 Fast Track
21:30 – Weekend in Stills

Wednesdays
20:00 – Cockpit View
21:00 – The Paddock View Live

Thursdays
20:00 – Radio Soundbites
21:00 – Hybrid

Fridays
20:00 – The F1 Show Live
21:00 – Fanzone Live
21:30 – The Paddock View (repeat)

The end result being that you have 7 and a half hours of original content with original content on Tuesday through Friday, a vast improvement on now. And how would Saturdays and Sundays shape up?

Saturdays
10:00 – Race Highlights (repeat)
11:30 – Weekend in Words (repeat)
12:30 – F1 Fast Track (repeat)
13:00 – Weekend in Stills (repeat)
13:30 – Cockpit View (repeat)
14:30 – The Paddock View (repeat)
15:30 – Radio Soundbites (repeat)
16:30 – Hybrid (repeat)
17:30 – The F1 Show (repeat)
18:30 – Fanzone (repeat)
19:00 to 22:30 – Classic F1 Race

Sundays
10:00 – The F1 Show (repeat)
11:00 – Fanzone (repeat)
12:00 – Classic F1 Race (repeat)
15:30 – The Paddock View (repeat)
16:30 – Radio Soundbites (repeat)
17:30 – Hybrid (repeat)
18:00 – Weekend in Words (repeat)
19:00 – Weekend in Stills (repeat)
19:30 – IndyCar Series (live)

One classic race per weekend is fine in my opinion, with a repeat of it the following day. Anything else would be too much, but one classic race per weekend when F1 is not on would be fantastic in my opinion. Saturday and Sunday offers a catch-up for anyone who missed the weekend offerings, and it also means things are not repeated that much compared to now where some things are repeated many times, for instance the Australian Grand Prix highlights show must be on its 10th repeat by now! Also, I didn’t sneak IndyCars in there at 19:30, that was deliberate! It should be on Sky Sports F1 in my opinion to prevent it being thrown around Sky Sports 2, 3 and 4. It’s the logical thing to do.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my blogs so far. My fifth and final blog in ‘The Verdict’ concerns ratings! Have they gone up? Have they gone down? Or have they stayed the same? Comment away in the comments, agree or disagree, I don’t mind!

Sky Sports confirm Indy 500 scheduling

During today’s IndyCars race programme on Sky Sports F1, it was confirmed that that Indianapolis 500 race on Sunday 27th May will air at 16:30 live on Sky Sports 4. What’s interesting here, though, is that on the same day is the Monaco Grand Prix, from 11:30 to 16:30 live on Sky Sports F1.

For a race billed as “the greatest motor racing spectacle”, why is it on Sky Sports 4? Secondly, it would make far more sense to put it on Sky Sports F1 given the core Indy 500 audience would already be watching that channel. I imagine that 99 percent of the IndyCar Series viewers in the UK also watch Formula 1. So putting the Indy 500 race on the same channel as the Monaco Grand Prix surely would be a logical decision? It seems someone on the Sky Sports hierarchy disagrees…