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It really is irritating how often they plug that.

Driver Tracker wasn't even avaliable via the Red Button because Sky think the 'Highlights' feed is a better option.

OnBoard-Mix wasn't avaliable online either

I don't pay for Sky, but i know how it is to pay to watch F1. And believe me, Sky's coverage is 100x better than SportTV's (anyone who's heard the undead commentator can testify), but that doesn't stop me from complaining at the constant feature pluggings they do.

That's the thing I guess. A lot of countries have worse coverage than the UK, but in the UK we probably pay the most overall for it given the TV License is mandatory.

We pay a rather substantial amount of money to the BBC, and last year they provided outstanding coverage. Then they fucked up, and we now have to pay more money, to get worse coverage. Got to understand why Brits are pissed here. But I do sympathise with other countries with even worse coverage.

One thing that's great about the BBC coverage is additional video footage used for analysis etc. (onboards of starts not shown on the World Feed, extra onboards of some incidents etc.). They've just shown Alonso passing Perez for the lead from Fernando's onboard camera. That's where there is still room for improvement on Sky. Also, I think there is too much general talking, interviews and too little analysis of specific incidents accompanied with video footage (something BBC was great at, especially at the beginning, 2009-10). Sky could've analysed Vettel getting a puncture and his radio instructions but they decided to pretty much ignore it (similar to what happened with the last lap chaos in Australia - after watching Sky post-race I still didn't have a clue what happened while BBC at least showed the last lap from di Resta's onboard, which cleared the picture a little bit).

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Agree, The post race is the biggest weakness in Sky's coverage right now.

There biggest problem is analysis, The bits Ant's done on the Skypad analysinsg incidents at Melbourne & Sepang has been fantastic, However they don't do enough of it.

Today for example they went to Ant who did a good job going over Button's collision with Karthekeyan but that was the only time they used him & the Skypad.
Would have been nice to have him go over the start, The collision between Grosjean/Schumacher, How various drivers gained or lost places, How Vettel managed to hit Karthekeyan etc.... Yet they spent most there post race doing OK interviews, Showing pre-recorded clips not relating to the actual race & showing Commercial breaks.


Everything Sky need to produce a better show is there, They just need to actually make use of it all. With the technology they have avaliable, All the footage there getting from FOM, The team radio broadcast's which are now avaliable & the people they have on there team its inexcusable that what they put out post-race the past 2 weeks has been as underwhelming as it has been.

Did the same thing today as I did for Australia; a muted Sky stream and JA Squared (or should that be Squire-d, ha ha) on audio. Both of them sounded a lot better; Jaime in particular sounded far more confident in his opinions, especially when he was talking about why he would decide to follow the SC in and take on inters at the first opportunity. The whole thing sounded really good.

Also enjoyed the Ben and DC show later on, and I am looking forward to hearing them live in three weeks' time.

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Dan Wheldon ¦ 1978-2011
Marco Simoncelli ¦ 1987-2011
Jules Bianchi ¦ 1989-2015
Justin Wilson ¦ 1978-2015

Yeah, I know he's mad and I don't care. I do not care. I did not care then. I do not care now. I'm here to race him.

Yeah their post race coverage could do with sprucing up a tad, and their main presenter.... well, less said the better.

Actually, did Sky (UK) show any ad breaks during the red flag? Just curious... I didn't see most of the red flag period.

I didn't realise til Greg Rust mentioned it at the end. It was fantastic. Get breaks over during safety car periods.

On a side note, Criag Baird and Darryl Beattie should not commentate. Analyse yes, but that's all.

Commentary is fine, but given they didn't put any work into that, they just bought the BBCs best, it can hardly be credited to them. It's everything else that's a step down. Not one single aspect is better than BBC 2011. Having two broadcasters competing is meant to raise the competition and standards, but it's actually gone down. Sky just bought BBCs best, and plugged in horrible overdone graphics and gimmick from other sports presentation programs and called it a day. Silly interactive screens may work in other sports (or may not, whatever), but it's just there for the sake of flashiness with Sky. And because BBCs crew have all left, we're just left with the worst they had (except DC, he's become pretty good) and cheaper coverage. Add in Bed Edwards shouting about everything, no matter how unimportant it is, and misidentifying cars every freaking time (it isn't hard Ben!), and we're left with sub-par coverage there too.

I'm not claiming that the UK is hard up for coverage - a lot of countries have it much worse. But we've take 2 massive leaps backwards from last year. And yet we're paying more money for it? Well, streaming Sky has justified my feelings before it - I'm not paying for that. And I'd love a public enquiry into just how the BBC has fucked up it's finances so spectacularly that they've had to make these cuts. £145 a year is a significant amount of money, and they are cutting the services?

I believe they did, but no more than 2.

There were no Ad's shown during the red flag.

Look at this screenshot, I think this is where HDTV is at its best!!

Thanks, just wondered if they'd keept to the letter of their advertising or not.

Here is my view to watched the qualifying:

that is maybe a little bit nerdy

not really, last year there was so much action during the races that it was almost essential to have the Onboard and Live Timing alongside the World Feed. FOM doesn't always show everything on the main channel so why not use some additional feeds...

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RaceDay.watch — Your Guide to Watching Motorsports

I'd imagine that having the licence fee frozen (given that previous settlements have usually been at least in line with inflation) and having Foreign Office funding withdrawn from the World Service at the same time left a rather big hole in the BBC's finances.

The BBC didn't really fuck up their finances, George Osborne withdrew the funding for BBCWS and S4C which amounted to £300million a year (without any notice), they were doing OK with the License Fee freezes till that happened.

Then add in the two people responsible for the cuts both openly admit they think Motorsport is a waste of space and you can see why F1 got sold out to save BBC4....