BERNIEVISION! The Story of the Ill-Fated F1 Digital Platform
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 พ.ย. 2022
- Today, there's F1 TV Pro or whatever it is, an online app and subscription service that gives you EVERYTHING you need in a Grand Prix. But before the internet, there was this thing called TV.
And at the end of the 90s and into the 2000s, the buzzword was digital. Everything was branded digital, and F1 saw the opportunity to make the most of this new tech.
So what was it? Let's have a look.
Enjoy! And remember to like and subscribe for more!
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Only 12.8k subscribers to go until Roberto Moreno!
And then it’ll just be a link to his beyond the grid episode.
Hard work done for me 😎
There's a site where you can compare drivers of different eras, with the site converting performances from different scoring systems to give a comparison.
It sh*t itself when I asked it to compare Moreno with the Tosser.
Available now on Aiden Millward digital 3D for only £9.99 a month
💪💪💪💪💪
@@AidanMillward Imagine, it would be hilarious
I miss free to air Formula One races in the UK 😞
I would if I liked modern F1.
its annoying the only race you can watch live free is the british grand prix (and abu dhabi 2021)
We all do :(
@@60103FlyingScotsman we can thank the broadcast laws for that one. England football/rugby, fa cup final, Wimbledon, world snooker and British Grand Prix have to be shown on FTA
US open final got put on channel 4 but only cos of Raducanu
I bemoaned the ITV coverage and was happy when it went back to BBC, but of course we didn't know how good we had it. I wonder how much the popularity of F1 has sufferred in the UK since we no longer have live races.
There’s nothing that gives me more nostalgia than those grey and yellow block graphics of the 90s.
Yes, North America had our own commentators. We heard from Bob Varsha, Steve Matchet, and David Hobbs. They sat in a studio in Charlotte, North Carolina watching the same feed we watched, without commercial breaks, so they could fill us in on what happened during the commercials. That line up changed when NBC took over. Then in 2016, I think, ESPN got the broadcast rights in the US. They just showed us the Sky Sports feed with the Sky Sports British commentary, but they screwed up at the first race. ESPN cut to commercial just as one of the Haas cars pitted and when the commercials were over they went back to the race and both Haas cars were listed as out of the race and we didn't know why. ESPN caught some heat for that and since then we've gotten to see the races commercial free.
When I watch races from the analog era I'm always shocked by how bad the quality was.
Analog television quality is not that bad, it's more likely that the problem is that you are watching VHS, Betamax or V2000 transfers which have a much lower bandwidth than broadcast television. In a lot of cases, FOM no longer seems to have professional-grade tapes of the original broadcast quality, unfortunately. On a typical 63cm/24" CRT in the 1980's, the Senna/Prost battle (I think this is in broadcast quality) would have looked quite reasonable: th-cam.com/video/xLI6fOG3WdI/w-d-xo.html ...Obviously by the 90's you could get 1080-line 16:9 high definition CRTs on the Japanese Muse encoding system, but that Muse system never gained traction beyond Japan.
David Hobbs and Bob Varsha were the F1 voices of my childhood much like Murray and James/Martin were for the rest of the English speaking g world
2018 was when F1 was on ESPN/ABC in America started
Also I remember the first 2 years of F1 on ESPN having commercials…
@@IanTheMotorsportsMan_YT I'm pretty sure it was 2016 because that was the year Haas debuted. It was only the first race on ESPN that had commercials. It's been sponsored by Mothers ever since.
Edit: You're right about 2018. But I'm positive it was only the first race on ESPN that had commercials. They missed Haas double DNF during a commercial break, among other things, and the feedback was swift and negative.
Ralf crashing at Spa in 1997 was actually on the way to the grid for the race!
I honestly love the Digital+ format, despite never having money to see it as a kid. Pity some of the Digital+ feeds are lost media. I'm actually in the midst of restoring all the F1 2001 season, both World Feed and Digital where available. Ended up finding a direct Digital+ broadcast feed of Hockenheim 2001.
Also the Digital+ 1999-2002 are better than the OG graphics. Fite me.
Sounds like a fantastic project! Would love to know more about it!
Where do you find them? All the links I find on old forums are dead.
@@Streetw1s3r Your best bet is to look for old Premiere broadcasts
TSN Go (TSN’s mobile streaming app) actually still kinda does this today. One channel will have the live race broadcast from Sky Sports, but then there’s bonus channels only available on the app with select on-boards with no commentary, a pit lane camera, and live timing
Very cool
We Canadians do all that to watch Latifi at the back of the pack and Stroll running into people in the midfield lol
Nascar had a similar thing on the DirecTV cable service in the 2000s where you could watch onboards and even have commentary on a specific driver (Rick Allen would commentate about dale Jr's race for example) I was a little kid when this was around but I have vague memories of seeing my brother watching it at my grandparents house
I was going to comment this but I wanted to make sure someone else did so thanks! Iirc you also could get team radio on it too
NASCAR In Car !
Bernievision's most lasting impact is probably giving us some of the most popular onboards from that era available on TH-cam. Just wish I'd been around then with a recorder myself.
You know. I’d love to have a story time about Walter Wolf. He seems a fascinating man
From 1995 to 2004 RTÉ had the rights to show F1 in Ireland with David Kennedy on co-commentary.
Nothing makes me happier than late 90s/early 00s digital media ventures history by racing associations. NHRA had a PPV Stream, NASCAR had an AOL thing and were relatively short lived. I just love this kinda stuff
We missed out in the UK and Ireland so much without this service, the sheer variety of feeds as explained in detail for no reason at all other than to show off at the end of the 1997 Season Review could make you jealous. When it finally arrived here it was too late, and pay per view was never going to go down well here. We like a special treat shelling out for a boxing match or a WWE event, but a payment every race for F1, when we have ITV and RTE? Nope. But Mr. E loves some extra dough. 2002's Michael redwash didn't help, but I enjoyed the novelty of the multiscreen setup when I got to watch the German Grand Prix on the service.
A proper subscription these days with Sky is better, but even then not really, because history repeats - we don't get F1TV Pro, just Access, which means we're stuck with whatever Sky chooses to cycle through on its Race Control screen, which on Sky Q has always been terribly designed compared to its predecessor Sky+. You have to cycle through multiple menus, and can only have 2 side by side, compared to the bank of screens F1 Digital+ and later Sky+ had. Sky+ also had a commentary free option, so I didn't have to listen to Croft and Brundle. No such luck on Sky Q. Their new contract quashed any hopes of a better setup. I've given up on Race Control, and just do a standard record, live on Sky, highlights with the better faces/voices on Channel 4.
F1 Digital+ was my introduction to the legend that is Ben Edwards. I miss him. The true owner of "Lights out, away we go!" Get your own catchphrase, David Croft, you bloody thief! At least Martin Brundle had his own saying for the five lights, which never caught on: "Look, but never stare."
Their trailers with the Voice of Sky, Bruce Hammal, Narrator of the 1999 Season Review, which would run through past highlights of whichever circuit we were at next, are a fond memory of my earliest days with both F1 and Sky. "F1 Digital+. Live, uninterrupted and interactive Formula 1..." "F1 Digital+. The future of Formula 1... Now." Yeah, about that...
F1 Digital+. We hardly knew ye.
Ben Edwards is still around and an occasional commentator on F1TV, brigtening up the usually poor lineup there.
Yep. Ben Edwards was doing lights out away we go long before Crofty was.
I remember having an F1 2000 season review on DVD and as well as the race highlights with commentary (SUPER) it also had separate highlights for TRACK, OBC and PITS. I never knew they originated from this so called “Bernie vision”
For some reason I'll always remember Martin Brundle chatting to Bernie on the grid before a race and Bernie brought up the digital platform, saying something like "you know, with all the extra features" to which Martin responded along the lines of "and if you watch it you double the viewing figures". Heh.
Even during this era, we still didn't have access to it where I lived in the USA. Unless you had one of the big honking dishes mounted on a pole, not one of the small ones we have now, the big ones that rotated, you were lucky to catch ANY F1 content. I was born in 1988 and the first full uninterrupted F1 race that I was able to watch was on ESPN in 2004, and I had to wake up at 3am to catch it because they never aired replays. I assume that people living in metropolitan cities had access, but I grew up with only Over the Air broadcasts, meaning the only racing I got was NASCAR and Indy/Champ Car.
As someone fascinated by the analog/digital transition and how the aesthetics of sports broadcasting evolved with it, this is interesting to learn.
We actually got the F1 Digital feed here in the USA sporadically...ABC used F1 Digital feed for their broadcasts in 2001 and 2002...I loved it personally it was refreshing new take from the old graphics which I thought were boring as hell glad they took the ideas from it in the later years we are all better off because of it
Aidan, the TVs are in fact 240p, 576i isnt alot better especially for fast cars going in front on the screen because its interlaced. It was mainly just the signal that was bad back in the day, 240p can be surprisingly crisp with the right video source!
I remember this, and even saw the set-up (from a distance) when I travelled to Melbourne. I thought (at the time) it was both a huge gamble and a great idea if it worked (it didn't). Credit for Bernie for improving the overall show as a result. Without this venture we would not have the coverage we do today.
There was a 5 minute advert for this service at the end of my 1997 season review VHS. Only time i ever heard of it before.
Those little lines definitely did move. I'm sure of it. Great memories!
The 1997 season review had a good insight into the new F1 Digital feed. Where it shows a cool lighting strike during the 1997 French GP from Michael Schumacher's onboard camera
Oh man, this brought back some memories. I remember seeing ads for this and wanting it, but being the kid I was at the time I obviously had to stick to the free-to-air stuff.
I started subscribing to F1TV Pro this year when it became available here in Finland after the local F1 rights moved to a different broadcaster. There is a nice variety of content which makes it worth the cost, but the unreliability you mentioned still holds true. The live feed will occasionally cut out even on my 1Gbps connection. I suspect the problem is with their smart TV app more than anything else.
Very interesting video Aidan! You probably won't see my comment but I had a good little system in the 00s. I live in Kent right on the tip of the country (Margate way) and we could get French channels on the old analogue set up! It was a little grainy in places but when ITV wanted to show ads all the time I switched to whatever channel I had tuned in some French channel and I'd watch the pictures from that for around 3 to 5 mins then I'd switch it back to ITV. This helped a lot and I didn't get such a load of crap shoved down my throat by ITV.
Those days had gone in the end and the F1 Digital thing passed me by as we could never really afford digital or satellite TV. I only became aware of F1 Digital because of the F1 2002 season review that came free with the PS2 game of that season. I remember the old yellow and black graphics and loved the nostalgic factor they gave off. It was what we was used to
What ultimately killed the standalone service was:
1. The price for the package that Sky were offering.
2. The 2002 title going to Schumacher by July.
By the following season the extra feeds and options were only available IIRC on Premiere in Germany and Sky Italia.
F1 here stateside with ESPN was Bob Varsha and Derek Daly. Then when fox sports took over it was...Bob Varsha and Derek Daly...although Mike Joy commentated a race in 99...
And the only reason why Mike Joy called that F1 race was because the NASCAR race that weekend was on TNN & called by Eli Gold. Mike Joy at the time only called NASCAR races for CBS, then went to Fox after it got the NASCAR rights from CBS in 2001 where he has remained ever since.
I remember hiring a 'Kangaroo TV' unit at the British GP in 2007. It was a handheld device which cost about £65 hire for the 3 day weekend - they even let you take it home 😀
It had a small screen and allowed you to watch live footage from any of the TV cameras or onboard footage, with some screens for live timing data.
I found it very useful as you could follow the race properly at the track, understand the driver lap and sector times. This is all basic now but was very 'shiny new' back then.
Think this also flopped after a year, probably due to cost and mobile phone data/information becoming more available.
:: EDIT ::
Here is a video showing the Kangaroo TV unit : th-cam.com/video/AT5NEbvJYRE/w-d-xo.html
Fascinating.
Or Fanvision. Last seen in 2012 & 2018.
You could hire those at Le Mans back around the same time .
Gotta say I'd much prefer them just putting up big screens like V8 Supercars did, you could follow it well enough
NASCAR had FanVision over here in the states that functioned the exact same way.
A little thing that also got added to the standard graphics package, but only for digital viewers in mid-1997 was a lap counter! It's such a little thing you'd think the standard world feed would also have gotten but nope, had to wait til 2003 for that!
It always amused me how despite all these incredible new shots and bells and whistles that Bernievision brought, they somehow managed to miss the massive Spa 98 crash!
More f1 stories please aiden 🙏. I enjoy them soooo much.
✌️👍
I started watching F1 on American TV in 1986 with the Detroit GP on CBS because it was in America. All the other races were carried, as now, on ESPN. In those days we had our own commentator, Bob Varsha. He was a fixture on racing broadcasts for years which included sports car racing and I think CART
3:04 True. In the US we were suffering with some of the worst commentaries ever. Thank God for torrent sites like FormulaMonkey that posted F1 races from UK broadcasts fairly quickly.
You must be recalling Rick DeBruhl.
I liked Bob Varsha and David Hobbs. Sometimes Hobbs would go on some weird rambles.
@@AndyS-kv2jh I liked Varsha and Hobbs too. Towards the end of their tenure one should probably cut Hobbs some slack for being really old.
@@mannacler he was pretty bad although it must be said that the only reason why he got the gig in both 2003 & 2004 was because Bob Varsha was still the lead announcer for Champ Car (the remnants of CART after it went bankrupt the previous year). Because of scheduling conflicts between the two series, Varsha could not call the majority of F1 races during those two seasons. However for the 2005 season Varsha was let go by Champ Car & replaced by Rick DeBruhl which allowed to return to a full F1 schedule again.
I did! Here in the Nordic Countries we had F1 Digital from 1997- 2002, & it was called Kiosk ;)
Really, really happy with it, & I remember how much i used to miss it for the following 15 years until F1 TV Pro arrived, because you really could watch the race on your terms, & in some ways, its even better then F1 TV is today! So ahead of its time, its just a crying shame it was not more apperciated!
But one thing I miss even more is Kangaroo TV/ FanVision at the races. A crying shame that in many ways the same on track experience, is the same when attending a GP Live.
Grand Prix 4? 😀
I remember the ads for "Canal+ Digital" on French TV, that were saying "F1 on 6 channels!" and at the time all I could watch F1 from was French broadcaster TF1 which also ran a lot of ads like ITV, and also had annoying commenting, so it was advertising for my dreams really.
Free to air SD analog TV was always 576i in 50Hz regions and 480i in 60Hz regions. That didn't change. It was never 240p, that was video game consoles.
Came here to say this! @Aidan Millward - you may have been a bit young to remember, but analogue TV quality was no worse than SD digital if you had a good signal, and if the bitrate for the digital had been stomped on, analogue was possibly better.
I also remember watching cricket during the analogue era when digital links from the ground to the transmission site came in - and getting very irritated by the new experience of macroblocking during quick camera pans, which had never previously existed!
@@blahblahwhatblahblah yep, digital was a big step backwards in a lot of ways when it first launched.
@@blahblahwhatblahblah Japan had HD way back in the early 90s called HiVision or something like that, 1035i resolution, was very sharp and clear
4:17 it's actually an optical illusion I forgot the name of just now
I recall thinking, seeing this come in from The Wrong Side of The Pond, 'This'll never last.' (I'm just using my phone to post this... watching on my 49" 2160p TV.)
I absolutely love watching the races with those old graphics on. Nostalgia to the max.
Huh. I always wondered where those blue graphics came from. Thanks for the informational video.
4:17 that bar looks like something that would be in either Tekken or Soul Calibur, thank God the gap is displayed by the +/- and delta
I remember it very much. I used the service once that year for the Monaco Grand Prix. Was actually quite good, good graphics and I loved flicking around for the best track action. But couldn’t use it all the time it was just too expensive.
But looking at todays F1 services and interactive channels for me it was a forerunner of what we have today.
F1D+ was great and ahead of its time although not always perfect, Spa 98 being an obvious example (not that I saw that until years later thanks to the internet!). The only time we ever got to see anything like F1D+ in the UK was F3000 on ITV/Eurosport that used a slanted purple variant of the F1D+ graphics set. I also think that being burned on F1D+ is why it took Bernie so long to greenlight 16:9 coverage and eventually HD.
Personally whilst I was delighted when it arrived in 2002 I was away at uni for most of the season so never got to experience it regularly and was still stuck with the thin gruel we'd become used to on ITV for most of the season.
We did of course get the supersignal for the standard world feed of the 2002 USGP ('thanks Bernie for pictures' as I remember Tony Jardine saying!). Although even that was substandard as it had been converted from PAL to NTSC (for the US market) and back again to PAL for the rest of us whereas on Sky you got the native PAL version. Also whilst F1D+ wasn't recordable on Sky did run interactive replays like Sky F1 did initially but I think that's been abandoned for a while (I now get Sky via BT so not 100% sure of that).
All these memories make me lament the standard of world feed direction in recent seasons which has gone downhill albeit still miles better than some of the old host broadcasters and of course the abysmal TMC!
Ah you say that but you could record F1 digital plus from a sky box to vhs (I know because I did this for the British Grand Prix)
Those graphics shown at 5:08 look very similar to current FIS graphics package, which is ski jumping, cross-country and alpine skiing.
BernieVision was a perfectly sound and practical broadcast model - it was just 20 years too early.
Can remember at the time how much F1 digital plus effected the standard broadcast as Ralf Schumacher was the only on-board car we could see at the 1999 Australian Grand Prix and ITV ended up broadcasting from a local hotel, Bernie withholding qualifying for the 1999 French Grand Prix from ITV audiences and having broadcast from a studio in London instead. You could tell how much Bernie wanted it to succeed
I recall reading that the German GP of 1996 was partly selected as the first race for F1Digital due to historic reasons: the first race to be aired in colour instead of black and white was also from Germany, the 1967 (?) race at Nürburgring. (I might be wrong on this one)
Bernievision was also rolled out in the Nordic countries in the late 90s or 2000. In Finland, you could get it as part of a satellite package. I remember seeing ads for it especially in the 2000-2001 off season: the free-to-air broadcaster MTV3 changed the commentating team, kicking out Matti Kyllönen ("the Finnish Murray Walker", as some dubbed him), and F1 Digital was quick to hire the popular commentator.
Not only am I old enough to remember “Digital” as a marketing term, I giggle hysterically at the term “cyber Monday”…. Because that’s something else entirely that has nothing to do with shopping
In Sweden i had F1 Digtal+ on Filmnet from 1997 (Only the main channel during 97.) then on Canal+ with all channels.
I loved it 👍
Distinctly recall a Norbert Haug Marsbar cam \m/
Aidan, sir, if you're ever in the states and want to check out some of the best open wheel events we have to offer over here, coordinate it with the Indy race(s) in Iowa and the World of Outlaws 410cid sprint car Knoxville nationals
The Indy race is on a 7/8 mile oval...short track Indy is super interesting!
But I think you would get a real kick out of the sprint cars. While they aren't very technically advanced, they are some of the most interesting cars ever. And Knoxville is super, super fast...and they have the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame and Museum.
I remember, we had an f1 subscription service, and it was actually the first digital finnish ppv channel there was. It needed a digibox, and a card. OFC there was canal + but the f1 thing preceded what turnt into the finnish canal+. We had a projector when i was a kid, watched with my dad almost every race. Then was yellow cars, so it has to be at this moment in history.
I duno f1tvpro in the states over last 2 yrs has been a godsend. No more illegal streams to get commercial free races..
What’s explained in this video also helps explain the kind of historic F1 videos that pop up on youtube from time to time. As a Canadian viewer I had no idea any of this existed
great video
I had this service and remember it being pretty good for the time with different onboard cams to choose from
Years ago I picked up a really cheap copy of F1 2002 for the PS2. The game itself was meh, but it came with a highlights DVD of the 2001 season, with alternate camera angles taken from F1 Digital and excellent commentary from Ben Edwards (the guy who used to do Channel 4's commentary). Well worth the purchase IMO.
I remember getting a cheap half season pass for Bernievision, I liken it to paying for TH-cam Premium vs TH-cam Peasant, you got to watch the same F1 race as is on ITV but with 2 bonus features, no ads & no James Allen! Ben Edwards and John Watson on comms were good and the camera angles and direction were a genuine step up but at a time when live races were free to air it stood no chance of being a success.
We had Speedvision with David Hobbs commentating then in the States.
Murray at al were what we saw over here north of 49. It looked good to us at the time but wow, if you recorded it even on a decent vcr it looked like watching it through a glass jar smeared with dish soap.
When I visited Williams in the 90's F1 were trialling I guess the forerunner of this with the teams. I don't recall the year but Williams were then under the Rothmans sponsorship. We watched a European GP in their theatre and the fact we could swap to numerous differing live views at will, including the two car onboards was very impressive at the time. I don't recall any graphics but the quality was there. I always wondered what happened to the eventual product, I didn't really notice it when it came to market.
I can't be the only one who gets driven mad by the current system where they take a close battle where you're watching the time to see if they're within 1 second or how close they are under that second, and the live feed either shows the pictures of the driver's battling or just highlights their name, thereby hiding the time interval for literally no reason whatsoever
F1TV as from 2021 is actually very good. 50fps, 1080p, good commentary, they added their own commentary team etc.
It was hugely ahead of its time, and it's a real shame that F1TV doesn't have these versions online, only the "standard" versions.
Seeing those graphics gave me a massive nostalgia whiplash
Formula Pro broadcast room ftw
Back in 2011 I brought a FanVision device €265 at the time! Only used it once at the Turkish GP. Not long after it got scrapped !
The FIA have so many streaming platforms for all the different championship's at the moment, it's hard to keep track, I'd rather just pay for an FIA TV like thing and have everything in one place
The problem is all those championships are owned by different rights holders. The FIA is only marshalling the competition, not producing the content.
Still no explanation of how the retroencabulator dencoded the multiport broadwidth bandsignal in such a way that the V10 era falsely appeared to be more exciting than the V6 turboretroencabulator pulse-modulated hyperwidth era. 2 stars.
7:48 "if you're a Sky Glass or Sky-Q customer..."
I remember when watching this on sky. Every practice, Quailfying and the race
I watched f1 digital when Fisichella dumped it in magny cours qualy and didnt race, 2002 i think. Didnt even know it existed before then. Sad that the monopoly finally took over in Britain
I subscribe to F1 TV pro. 2seasons now. its very good. it has all the on boards and map and also two broadcasts, one with F1TV personal (Palmer, Will Buxton and Ben Edwards) and International (with Brundle and Crofty). unfortunately Sky Streaming is only available in UK, I would switch in a heartbeat. the video broadcast is not synched(not the same) with International Audio broadcast, the one I use, with croft and brundle. so sometimes they are commenting something that we should be seeing, but, are not.
F1 TV Pro works very well, by the end of 2022, and to be honest, I don't see myself going back to the local TV broadcast rights holder. Some of the things that F1 TV Digital debut are still available today on F1 TV Pro, like the data only channel. Quite good if you put it on the tablet while watching on TV.
Regarding the worst rebrand of all time, I'd like to give an honourable mention to Royal Mail being rebranded and swiftly unrebranded as Consignia 🤨. Questionable rebranding was the new black in the early 2000s, I guess 🤣👉 😎. If they would have kept the name, I'm sure we would have got over it eventually. There were bigger fish to fry back then. Changed the world forever,.. just like now 😔.
Digital TV via dish in heavy rain . . I find this astonishing! 🤨. I mean, you think about the stuff we can do: We can walk on the moon, and we can... do other stuff. And then _this._ It is amazing! 😵.
Coronation Street - flat out in 6th gear should shave off a couple tenths 😺🏁 .
I remember convincing my dad to get this for one of the races and it was actually really good. But it was crazy expensive for the time.
F1 TV works well enough if you're someone like me who doesn't have traditional cable. My only complaint using it this season is the lack of resume feature like on Netflix. Its cool going back and watching the historic races too. I don't use the onboard or telemetry features.
ive been subbed to F1TV ever since it became a thing
even with how bad reliability was, if you lived in germany it was preferable to the awful RTL broadcast which seemed to have more ad breaks than race.
nowaways F1TV finally works well and i wouldnt wanna miss it. shaky start, but now its really good and tbh theres no other sport with such a solid service.
if you want you can have your own broadcast almost, different camera on every screen, timings, especially when youre watching with people and speculating that kinda stuff is super fun.
someone comes up with a theory and we can check lap times, tire deg and follow what we want even if sky is not focusing on it.
Probably why the FIA went hard on the copyright strikes
North America had Bob Varsha and David Hobbs. 2 of the best.
I remember growing up to the commentary of Walker and Hunter, later Brundle. Us Yanks only could watch F1 through ESPN in the 90s and most of the 80s. A couple years ago I did the F1TV Pro because it ended up being cheaper to watch, then having a big cable bill. Plus I am a big Indy fan, so I also needed the NBCSports channel to watch IndyCar. Now, I can drop my subscriptions in the off season and bring them back in the on. For F1, that really isn't an option, since it's almost all year and a year sub is cheaper. However, Indy is only for 6 or 7 months and I can drop Peacock. Now if my area had these all the F1 and IndyCar races on free TV, I would like that even better. At least I don't have to watch the adverts during F1.
The Canadian-market always had the British feed.
Was way ahead of it's time
12 quid per race was mental, even now. Not surprising nobody subscribed. I remember being quite irked that it meant we got terrible coverage in comparison, alas no Twitter to rant on. At least F1TV is like 70 quid for a season plus vpn fees.
F1TV is Epic.
The biggest improvement around that time was the addition of an official F1 broadcast. We still have that now. The local broadcasters were usually dreadful.
the 90's-2004 and 2005-2013 were the classic graphics where the audience didn't have to be distracted by unnecessary stats. still love it until now.
I was lucky enough to be able to get this through the means of totally legal satellite tv and it was great.. but weirdly one of the worst races to watch from the point of view of the world feed was indeed the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix. They somehow missed the first lap crash where half the field was wiped out (they were showing the leaders) and they even completely missed the Schumacher coulthard collision as they were showing a long Ferrari McLaren pit lane shot. But on the whole the direction away from that one race was amazing
As someone who lived through the 80s....new Coke was trash!!! And in North America it was Bob Varsha, David Hobbs, and Steve Matchett
I remember ITV Sports Channel... what a farce that was.
The quality of PAL television at the time was 576i at 25fps
Tell us more about the F1 TV Pro. I have been reluctant to subscribe, as I was a subscriber of the F1 Timing higher level app, Then I just gave that up as a bad joke, the damn thing just did not work. And you spend so much time trying to figure it out that you lost track of the race. It seems to have matured a lot now, and I am desperately ready to drop my local Satellite TV Provider, as F1 is the only reason that I keep hanging on. I watch about 50% of F1 Live, about 40% near Live, as in I start to watch before the race has finished, the rest is recorded to watch when soonest available
I think the biggest issue with this digital service is the fact that it was competing against free to air channels. Now if it had been like F1 is now with Sky, it might have had a chance (if we forget about exclusivity for a second) due to the Sky sports package being so expensive and not everyone can afford it. But when you have a choice of paying £12 per race for a few extra features vs watching it free, it is an easy choice really.
The current situation with F1 TV would be the better choice overall if they ended the broadcast deal with Sky and offered it for a more reasonable monthly fee. Even Now TV works out quite expensive if you only want to watch Sky F1.
Basically though trying to create a subscription service in the era of free to air broadcasts was never gonna work, Especially not at that price. £12 a month and maybe people would have considered it, but £12 per race ... nah!
I was in the army at the time and wanted sky sports but because we weren't allowed a sky dish on the barracks building I had to go with............ITV Digital to get sky channels and paid a ridiculous £80 a month for the privilege of what was basically a water down sky digital 😱 obviously we know how that went for ITV 😂
Bernie got his fingers burnt so bad with F1 Digital+, that he held back on investing in HD coverage way later than when most sports were embracing the tech. I remember him commenting in the late 2000's that he would only invest in HD if the TV companies were willing to pay for it. When you look at how he limited F1's social media, he seemed to have built a resistance to becoming an early adopter to new technology, which I always put down to the failure of F1 Digital+.
Commentary of course was taken from Eurosport so you would end up hearing John Watson and Ben Edwards. Adding Matt Lorenzo brings it full Eurosport considering he was hosting some of the early Eurosport broadcasts of the race weekend.
I obviously didn't have it either and I didn't really care for it. Because back then RTE had their own version and then later there was Eurosport/Setanta Sports so I could always flick between channels. Though I personally could've done without the Eddie Jordan worship. I don't think I was hardcore enough to try and get my parents to shell out that kind of money on a race per race basis. We still lived with cable TV, satellite TV was out of bounds.
Still whatever any of us can say about Bernie (and there's a lot of negative shit around him), I admired the chutzpah he had to go ahead with this in the first place.
I paid for a race and thoroughly enjoyed it. But never watched it again.
It was better than the Sky coverage, but not “£10 a race” better.
I’m loving the new F1 TV pro, I can finally watch F1 with British commentary. They might get a lot of flack for having favouritism, but trust me, the Dutch commentators over the last few years were way way way worse. Plus they would miss halve the stuff going on, or shout things that were plainly wrong.
Is it winter already in the UK?
It's not available in UK but, hey, VPNs and virtual credit cards exists. This whole 'exclusivity deals' thign makes no sense whatsoever in this day and age. I live in Finland and here Viaplay has an exclusivity deal with Liberty Media, but I despise the commentators as the only thing they talk about are how is Bottas doing, hence I stuck them up one, got a US virtual credit card, an American address, and signed up for F1TV Pro as if I were in the US. They should take a page from the WRC, by making their own streaming service available everywhere and give the viewer the right to choose where to watch it.
It's 4k now