Sky falling in on F1? Thoughts on the BBC/Sky F1 TV rights deal

'(Rupert) Murdoch hasn't got anything really big to drive their TV audiences and Formula 1 would be good for that. They have been trying to buy the TV rights from us for a long time but we won't because they are not free-to-air television broadcasters. They are a subscription service. Sky is doing an incredible job but if you look at their audience figures they are nowhere.

'With these figures it would be almost impossible for teams to find sponsors. That would be suicidal.'

Who said this, and when? Well, in light of the events of the past two days, it may surprise you that these are the words of one Bernard Charles Ecclestone, and he said it as recently as at the Turkish Grand Prix in May this year. On the other hand, it might not be that much of a surprise.

But the problem is, depsite his subsequent Damascene conversion, I think Bernie may have been spot on first time around.

This action may only be available live on Sky from 2012
Credit: Alex Comerford/CC

Yes, news that UK based F1 fans had feared arrived early on Friday this week. The BBC, the current TV rights holders and free-to-air broadcasters, in a cost saving exercise will only show half of the F1 races and qualifying sessions live in the UK from next year onwards, with all of the races being available live on Sky, a subscription service (with the BBC showing deferred highlights of these races, possibly deferred full races if you believe Martin Whitmarsh but it seems the BBC are denying this). Such a deal had long been rumoured, but that hasn't tempered the anger in response to the actual decision being confirmed.

I share this anger, and the anger is mainly on the grounds that I think this decision will result in many F1 fans not being able to watch live coverage of the races for half of the season, with a subsequent marked drop in the numbers who follow F1. And ultimately this will be bad for the sport.

Readers from outside the UK may be wondering what the fuss is about, especially if they are in countries where paying for subscription TV is well-established. However, strange though it is to say of a major TV market, paying for TV is still not part of the culture in the UK. Subscription channels first broadcast into UK homes only in 1989, and even now, despite Sky having around 10 million UK subscribers, subscription channels have a minuscule audience share (I read that the biggest audience on Sky Sports from 10 to 17 July, the most recent figures available, was 248,000 viewers for 20/20 Cricket). Watching the free-to-air remains the default for most.

And, if you don't have Sky and are interested in watching all F1 races live (and we all know that watching the full race or highlights after the event just isn't the same), then the costs of subscribing in order to have access to every race live are not small: £487 a year for their standard service which includes Sky Sports, £610 for HD. Therefore, with the 10 races you're not getting on the BBC, this works out at upwards of £60 a race! At that level of financial disincentive it's inevitable that F1 will lose a lot of viewers.

And it's not like there wasn't an alternative. Channel Four (another free-to-air broadcaster) had the same money on the table for the rights, the Sky option was taken up, apparently because of Sky's experience in broadcasting sport (though possibly sweetened by the £1m per team per year that has been mentioned as being on offer from Sky, which seems to have suitably sedated the team bosses on this). But you wonder the extent that Bernie, and the teams by their acquiescence, have done real long term damage to the sport in return for a short term gain. It also underlines, as if we didn't know it, the extent that the F1 fraternity is wholly out of touch with the wishes of its audience. It looks that, in agreeing to this deal, the benefits to F1 fans and to F1 as a sport more generally in terms of its retention of followers has not entered the equation.

Bernie Ecclestone

Subscription channels' low audience share in the UK is demonstrated by the fact that even Sky's flagship Premiership coverage only gets in the region of 1-2 million viewers at best. Even if you make an extremely generous estimate, which assumes many F1 fans take up Sky subscriptions for next year's F1, you'd think that's still only in the region of 3 million viewers at most. So, less than half than the 6-8 million viewers that the BBC's F1 coverage pulls in right now. It seems to defy all commercial logic to happily lose half of your customer base like that, even if it is in return for a financial sweetener. And to put it into a language that F1 team bosses would understand, that won't be good for their sponsors' exposure.

And it might not end there. There are the consequences of the loss of continuity and the subsequent loss of viewer loyalty. I'm assuming that the BBC would never allow half of its Eastenders episodes to be packed off to a subscription service elsewhere, as they'd worry they'd lose these viewers altogether. Same goes for any business - loyalty and continuity are king to continued transactions. Consumers these days have a lot of options on how to spend their time and don't like to be unduly confused or perturbed, and if the thread of watching each F1 race is lost they may be lost to the sport altogether.

And the warnings are there. Many point to the success of Premiership football coverage on Sky, and football's growth in popularity at the same time, as a parallel. But I'd suggest that the parallels are elsewhere, and are less encouraging. Football is not the best analogy in this case as it is the staple sport in the UK in a way that F1 isn't, and (with all due respect to The Big Match) live TV club football wasn't really established in this country before Sky came along. Highlights very much was, and crucially this was (and still is) retained by free-to-air broadcasting. Plus in football attending matches in person is much more readily available, and much more part of the culture, than it is for F1. Further, assuming that F1 on TV will establish itself as a collective 'watch in the pub' spectacle, as live football has and some have suggested F1 might on the back of the Sky deal, seems an incredible leap of faith. It's something that's never looked like happening in the past.

Boxing, and to a lesser extent cricket, are more obvious parallels for F1: established sports that jumped into bed with Sky and seem to have lost a chunk of their popular following as a consequence. I don't doubt, as many defending the deal have pointed out, that Sky's actual F1 coverage will be excellent, and that they'll put a lot of effort and resource into it. But it rather misses the point.

And who's to say it would stop here? The precedent has now been set, and allows subscription channels such as Sky more licence to strike similar deals for F1 coverage in other major markets, as well as for Sky and others to encroach for into F1 UK TV coverage, further elbowing out free-to-air, in the future. This could well turn out to be the thin end of the wedge.

Then there's the quality of the BBC's free-to-air coverage itself while all this is going on. No one doubts the BBC's coverage is fantastic currently, but if their priority is spending less money then the resource put into F1 coverage will likely decrease, with clear implications for the amount of of pre and post race coverage as well as for the F1 forum. Word is that they'll be sharing commentary with Sky initially (though not sharing presenting) but what happens longer term is anyone's guess. Whatever the case it seems inevitable that Sky will start waving cheques at the BBC's best talent, such as Martin Brundle and Ted Kravitz. Plus you wonder the extent that BBC journalists can establish relationships with and achieve access to key F1 figures as successfully as they are currently if they're only turning up to every other race, as well as sending fewer people to each. The possibility that the BBC end up proving a rump service free-to-air does not seem at all remote.

With all of this in mind, as Giles Richards in the Guardian said: 'Would it have been too much for a sport as rich as this one to have come up with a plan that allowed the BBC to keep its coverage but for the sport to make slightly less money? Sadly, F1 and Bernie don't do those deals'. As I said, the sport's protagonists are risking serious negative consequences for the collective that they operate in, for the sake it appears of keeping up their money rewards in the short term. It seems that people with power in F1 can't see beyond the end of their wallets.

There are plenty of reasons to take a dim view of the BBC's role in this as well. We all know that with their latest licence fee settlement that the axe has to fall somewhere, but as with anything where the axe falls is a matter of will and priorities. There is always a choice. And to go to such lengths in opening up a package, that rewards them with high viewing figures, that's thought to cost them £45m per year all in when you're an organisation spending £900m on a move from London to Salford does seem to betray a particularly warped sense of what your public wants from you. But sport is a soft target for them when making cuts, F1 especially so, and I suspect they know it.

And the BBC hasn't handled this well. Their initial reaction was to try to claim the deal was a triumph, and once they gauged the wider public hostility their Head of F1 effectively told his customer base that they were all plain wrong to be so outraged (perhaps he missed his calling as a sub editor for Pravda). But if the BBC were under any illusions about how F1 followers would react to the news they shouldn't be now. The said justification received over 3,000 comments, almost all negative, in its first evening (and links to it on the BBC website have since mysteriously disappeared).

And in all of this I've been prepared to park whatever misgivings I have about Rupert Murdoch and his media empire that F1 seems keen to be part of. Judging by the content of internet forums this is also a concern for many current F1 fans, who wouldn't consider paying for a Sky subscription even if they could afford to. If nothing else it is spectacularly bad timing, what with everything else that's been going on lately, and further demonstrating F1's ability to ignore how it's coming across more widely.

Of course, there now seems almost nothing that can stop this deal. The teams have been sedated with some cash as mentioned, the Concorde Agreement, via the usual devil in detail, has been surmounted and Bernie, the BBC and Sky have cut a deal that they show no signs of wanting or being able to go back on. I just hope now that I'm totally wrong and that the terribly clever people in F1 who've allowed this to happen know exactly what they're doing and aren't just following the short term financial gain in return for serious long term adverse consequences for the sport's health. But I fear that my misgivings are well-founded. In one hundred years' time when someone writes the history of F1's following in the UK, and even its following more widely, 29 July 2011 may go down as a black, black day.

A 'suicidal' one, as Bernie might have said.