Friday, March 16, 2012

2012 F1 tv coverage

Having been in Australia for five months and with another few weeks to go, I was keen to see if I could watch the new 2012 season races on local tv.
Obviously Bernie Ecclestone is doing a great job in monetising the sport so that in England in order to watch all the races live you have to take out a special f1 channel subscription at considerable expense. However this strategy could fail as previous viewers like myself are unwilling to accept the cost of watching what seems to be becoming a series of increasingly predictable races from increasingly boring circuits.
The new 2012F1 iPad app is also ridiculously priced at £19.99. This is way above the typical pricing of others apps so again it is one that I shall decline.

So my quest is to see if I can watch the F1 races and practice sessions free, both in England and Australia.
Being in Australia at the moment I have found that the ONE channel run by the Ten network are broadcasting all of the sessions of all of the races. That is great as this is a free terrestrial channel with the only snag being the adverts. However a HDD tv recorder with a 60 sec skip button overcomes this problem. ONE will be taking the Sky commentary with Martin Brundle for the Qualifying and the Race but using their own commentary for the practice sessions.
I have just watched P1 and P2 for the Australian GP coming from Melbourne.
Honestly, the commentary was crap. During the last 10 minutes of the sessions when the drivers and teams were going all out to complete their programs, there was a lot of action on the track and on the tv screen. Did Tom Clarkson comment on this action ? No. He just kept droning on about his thoughts on various driver's performance capability. Usually this was totally unrelated to anything on the screen. It was very frustrating. When asked by a co-commentator to explain the colour coding on tyres for 2012, Clarkson never did give the full answer.
So from now on for practice sessions I will watch the video but listen to the Radio 5Live audio on my iPad. OK I will not be able to skip the ads but at least I will not hear them.
Once I am back in the UK I just need to set up a suitable proxy server so that I can watch the streamed version of the ONE broadcast at http://tensport.com.au/motorsport-live-streaming.htm or if I have problems with that I can try the US coverage from http://www.speedtv.com/

I suspect that Bernie will eventually try to close these loopholes but by then I suspect that the whole circus will have got so boring with night races around desert circuits that it will not be worth watching anyway.

Peewit

No comments: