Formula 1 has been oddly and quite doggedly against embracing YouTube as a means to share its video content with fans, who resort to whatever’s available on the site
So you’ve finished watching a Formula 1 race and depending on your zeal for the sport you have watched it as a means to pass some time or have risked becoming a social pariah by ignoring friends and family to glue yourself to the television or have found an illegal stream of the live broadcast on some shady site on your computer.
If you are the former, then you are probably at peace with waiting for the next broadcast to watch some highlights or clips or maybe even catch a repeat of the race while channel surfing.
If you are the latter, however, then you need a fix as soon as possible. An on-board video of Alonso, Raikkonen, Hamilton or Vettel on the limit or a video clip of a major talking point of the race.
So what do you do? You turn to YouTube where enterprising tech geeks have managed to upload videos from their digital video recorders as well as the casual ‘pirates’ who have put up whatever they recorded with their smartphones.
What choice do you have? It’s not as if content like that is available on the official F1 site, except for a highlight video set to pop music that typically appears ten days after a Grand Prix weekend.
And YouTube piracy is not a guaranteed fix for your F1 fix. As soon as Formula One Management (FOM) gets a wind of them, they will have it removed.
FOM head Bernie Ecclestone made some headlines recently stating that he was planning on making a lot more content available to fans, while making it clear it would not be free.
WHY SO ANTI-SOCIAL?
So why this Kolaveri Di – so to speak – by F1 towards the video streaming site that is the third most visited website in the world (United States, India and Japan providing the three highest shares of visitors) as per web analytics site alexa.com?
The answer is staring you in the face, when you are not busy staring at it. Television. A network like Sky TV (commentary from which is now heard in India thanks to parent company News Corp’s ownership of Star Sports) is believed to be spending around Rs. 409.5 crore a year to secure the rights to broadcast every race live around its network. A further Rs. 256 crore a year will go towards production costs.
The idea of content like on-board videos, previews, reviews, analysis and features - including historical - being available for free is enough to send TV network executives into a cold sweat.
The argument that F1’s two-wheel counterpart (MotoGP) manages all this – videos start to be uploaded by the Saturday of a race weekend with a review ready four days after raceday – on its official YouTube channel will be lost to the network suits and maybe to Ecclestone too.
Not to the teams, drivers or their sponsors though, in all likelihood. Near 24/7 exposure as well as a fix for fans, both casual and hardcore? Too good to be true, but as of now, an opportunity wasted.
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