TBK-Light.com

That's not going to endear him to the production team at all, he might come to regret making comments like that. Still absolutely nothing to do with why the BBC lost half their coverage though.

They lost coverage because the idiots in charge have no idea how to handle money.

^If by idiots in charge you mean the government restricting the licence fee to help out their pal rupert, then ya....

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RIP Birmingham Wheels: here's some of the crash videos I recorded when it was there:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIaKIE ... 5t9d5PvoHA

Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/paulhadsley

No, they're idiots with the money they already get. You want them to have more to waste?

Yeah, so they can get what they need without having to make poor decisions about restricting the minority interests in favour of the majority stuff...

Public broadcasting should be about showing the stuff that no commercial broadcaster wants to show because it doesn't make profit, and it shouldn't have to worry about chasing ratings.

Sadly as soon as the licence fee was frozen it was like a butterfly effect of things being cut to save other things.
The government loves divide and conquer tactics such as these.
Freeze licence fee, watch BBC become under fire from all quarters as people lose something they care about and blame the BBC for it...cackle manically and phone uncle rupert that his plan is working and please continue writing nice things about them in the papers...

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RIP Birmingham Wheels: here's some of the crash videos I recorded when it was there:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIaKIE ... 5t9d5PvoHA

Twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/paulhadsley

Well this is awesome :roll: After the huge amounts of hype from NBC about their coverage of F1 for the 2013 season and onwards, this priority sport for NBC has been bumped by Premier League Football at the first chance presented. And NBC made all this noise about how it was going to enhance the presentation of the sport to the US viewer.

Nice one!

NBC? More like No Bloody Clue!

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BTCC Pick Em's Champion 2010
Formula Fun Cup Champion 2013
http://www.the-fastlane.co.uk

Haven't we been over this before?

The License Fee being frozen had nothing to do with it, the F1 budget was "ring fenced" but because Gideon decided in his wisdom to withdraw the State funding of the BBC World Service when they gave him the keys to the bank, but he conveniently forgot to amend the BBC mandate, which meant they were still required by law to provide the WS but it wouldn't be funded by the taxpayer like it had been since 1932.

So the BBC had a budget shortfall, to which the great solution to this (given by Patten, a Conservative to the bone) was to close BBC4 or scrap the F1 coverage, he even went as far as saying Wimbledon coverage should be scrapped too. As the BBC has to follow the decision making process the BBC Trust make, they had no option but to drop the F1 coverage, which they did in a roundabout way by selling the live rights to Sky.

The WS funding was later reinstated, but it was too late to stop the rights sharing with Sky.

It was not, in this case, the BBC that cocked up, they do quiet often, but not this time.

with Belgium's F1 coverage rapidly declining, I was wondering if there is an option to watch Sky TV from Belgium, without installing a satellite dish.

If I get this, will I just be able to connect this to the teli and watch everything F1 related? Seems a bit too easy.

http://www.skyeurope.tv/Sky-HD-Box-Shop

No, you still need the dish.

Couple other things you should know, if genuine, that is not Sky you are dealing with, but rather an agent who will subscribe to Sky on your behalf at a UK address, once Sky find out (because your box will not talk back) they will disconnect you.

I would even suspect that the site isn't even genuine, as most of these agents won't touch Sky nowdays. You will also need a very big dish to get the Sky signal, maybe 1.5 meter+, gone are the days where there was so much overbleed that you could pick up UK channels by simply pointing your dish in the general direction of the satellite.

Stick to streams, they're free and only marginally worse than subscribing direct.

This isn't true for many of the channels from the Sky package. Even with the FTA ones, which are now going to be much more difficult to receive outside the UK, Belgium is still one of the better places in terms of reach. Before the recent switch from Astra 1N to Astra 2E you could easily get away with a dish as small as 120cm in certain parts of Poland (for BBC/ITV) and for paid Sky channels the situation was even better (because their signal used the Pan-European beam as oppposed to the UK spot beam that the FTA channels were on). Now the FTA ones are going to be pretty much impossible to receive where I live but that's not the case for other channels.

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RaceDay.watch — Your Guide to Watching Motorsports

Always good to hear first hand experience, what size would you need to get the FTA channels?

The move from Astra 1N to 2E is taking place pretty much as we speak so it's still quite a big unkown but there are people saying 200cm will be an absolute minimum to even think of getting the FTA channels in most regions of Poland, and sadly this is quite a realistic assumption. We can pretty much wave goodbye to those channels in this part of Europe. I don't know how representative this is but here's the predicted footprint of Astra 2E (and given it's a spot beam, the reception will get worse with every kilometre by much more than it does normally):

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RaceDay.watch — Your Guide to Watching Motorsports

Some info about viewing figures in 2013
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... 2514238672

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Dan Wheldon | 1978 - 2011

It's the 8th year now when you can't watch live F1 in Finland without paying. Moreover the Internet stream just went from 68€/season to 90€ per season. *Sigh*. While a decade ago a F1 race used to gather a viewership of 1,5 million people, nowadays it's presumably around 300 000 people. Don't think Kimi's or Valtteri's success would cause more people paying for F1. F1 has declined to marginal sports.

Maybe the casual Finnish viewer got bored of F1 and not even having Finns at Ferrari and Williams can make it have more appeal?

Even the UK figures are creative, the BBC figures rose slightly, but the Sky ones remained fairly static, Bernie is deluded if he thinks Sebs domination put people off, people in the UK stopped watching because they refused to pay an extra £400 to do it, only the very hardcore viewers subb'd to SSF1. I think these figures also are taken from the potential viewers of a channel, not the actual number of viewers watching the specific program, it's all guesswork.

400 pounds for 20 races is a lot of money.

I'd pay 162.50 for Sport1 if I wanted to watch F1 here. But I also have a season ticket to my fav football team so I'd miss some races because of it conflicts with home games.
My wife hates the sound so I'm forced to go upstairs or she has to leave the room. If there isn't a birthday party on that day. I'm at a point in my life where I'm not leaving the bar early to watch F1 or wake up in middle of the night to watch it or plan my weekend around F1. I still love the sport, I follow the news but I'm not compelled to do whatever it takes to watch it. Especially if it means paying for it because some greedy bastards.

It's actually for just 10, because the other races are live on the BBC.

I should probably clarify, everybody who owns a TV in the UK has to have a TV License, this presently costs £145.50, so essentially you pay this "subscription" for the privilege of receiving the FTA channels (BBC, ITV etc.), for this, you get 9 races live on the BBC, along with 90 minute same day highlights of all the other races.

If you want to watch all the events (practice/qual/race) live (BBC carries practice/qualifying live for the races it covers live, but not at all for the highlight races), then you have to subscribe to Sky, I don't know the exact cost, but I think it's around £40 a month for the two packages you need to buy in order to get the F1 channel. Some people think this is good value, many do not, this £480 (approx) is in addition to the £145.50 you already pay for a TV License.

SkyF1 also shows the GP3 and GP2 races live, I should probably add that, since Simon will likely chime in with it to justify the cost

Liberty Global apparently looking to buy out CVCs share of F1, and more. This is relevant to TV broadcasting because they own Virgin Media, which potentially means Sky losing F1 coverage around the world.

I think it's un fair to suggest with sky you are only paying for f1. You get a shed load of good channels in high definition. Ok these are not to everyones taste but it's not like a single sport subscription.
I think Hd pack is £10, the basic pack used to be about £18. It might have all changed recently of course.