With regard to the support events they are better off with a broadcaster like Eurosport or Motors TV.

A case might be made for GP2 but something like Porsche supercup is of very limited interest to the GB viewing public. It was unlikely the BBC had any interest in showing it.

A specialist sports channel can fit it in somewhere in their schedule.

Hello folks,

Well I hope you were pleased by the BBC announcement?

I am here to answer any questions I can about the radio side of things.

Cheers,

Jason

Is Maurice Hamilton no longer part of the Five Live setup?

Beat me to it.

Hi Dank,

Maurice will still be involved in 5 Live's coverage. His duties with the newspapers he writes for have increased so we are trying to work round those issues. I can say that when available we will have Maurice with us.

Cheers,

Jason

Good news! Looking forward to the addition of Anthony Davidson as well this season.

Thanks Jason!

News on stuff from jb26 post on DS (put into my own words) :

- BBC wanted data channel, but rights didn't include it. They went to Bernie to ask for it.... I don't need to tell you answer its quite obvious for those that have followed Bernie for many years.
- Audience research has shown channels like onboard are not used often as people end up changing back to the main feed after a while; hence a mosaic screen being created. BUT it looks like that because of the comments on the BBC Sport website the onboard situation is being rethinked through.
- Support races were dropped because of budgets constraints - supports were booted in exchange for on-site studio.....

....and the news I've heard is that Setanta Sports could very well pick up the rights for GP2. Lovely.

I thought the BBC weren't going to have an on-site studio at each race but have Jake Humphries host from the UK?

And Setanta?!! Wonderful

'Martin Brundle and David Coulthard will be part of 5 Live F1's preview show on the Friday night of every race weekend!'

According to the 5LiveF1 on Twitter

It would either have been:

a) London studio
b) Pitlane
c) On-site studio

I hated Option B quite frankly through the ITV F1 coverage the negatives in my view outweigh the positives, so an on-site studio seems best. And yes, I think original plans said London studio, but that soon changed to on-site.

Another thing. Whoever gets the rights for the support races get ALL the support races with ALL sessions... it comes in one bundle according to jb.

Shame there won't be a data channel (live timing) screen. Strange that bernie would not allow it as Sky Italia get full screen onboard and a full screen live timing, which is the same as the F1 teams get at the track. (not the lite version from f1.com)

i'll be VERY unhappy if GP2,porsche supercup etc go to setanta(partially because i dont have it,its not worth the money)-GP2 on sunday mornings in particular is useful for if the weather conditions are hit and miss,and can give you a good idea of track/weather conditions before the f1 race-the thing is as well,it doesnt seem like setanta have that many fans........and i'd imagine most of those that do,wont watch it anyway-it'd make alot more sense for eurosport (though they may as well never bother with a schedule as they never keep to it) or dave (on freeview apparently,so before long everyone would be able to see stuff on that channel anyway due to the switchover) setanta have basically nothing to gain by having the GP2 etc,whereas the GP2/porsche supercup would compliment dave's WRC coverage quite well

Bit from jb26:

"The BBC have not lost GP2, they own all the rights to it.

They have decided to drop the support races in order to improve the F1 show. I'm also disappointed, but in the end you will end up with a higher quality F1 show. In a way, they are simply doing the same as what ITV did with F1, and appear to have decided that it's not economically viable for them to be shown."

And how much does GP2 cost:

"The costs we're talking about aren't contractual costs, but production costs / staff / infrastructure and so on. All the equipment is on site, but for every minute of television, there are numerous people and costs involved with getting that into your living room."

To be honest, I'm not too sure where GP2 stands in the scheme of things either in terms of interest. Nobody from last years series has made the jump to an F1 race seat apart from Buemi who was being lined up for the job a long, long time ago before he even set foot in a GP2 car. And people were already talking about F1 before Bruno Senna turned a wheel in British F3.

GP2 seems to be somewhere for F1 teams to place their young proteges whilst they work out which of their drivers to get rid of rather than somewhere for them to find new talent.

So hang on, the BBC have the rights to broadcast GP2 but aren't going to? Bummer

That's the news I wanted. I watched ITV's practice highlights last season, although at around 3 minutes long it was a short experience. I'm glad that practice highlights on red button will be an option, no more having to switch on the laptop on a Friday evening to see a sum total of 6 minutes of practice. Hopefully they'll be worthwhile though, I'm sure some good editing could make say a 15 minutes highlights/review very interesting. A few full laps onboard, etc, would be nice.

With regards GP2 (and other support races) and the rumour regarding Setanta.

Setanta have recently lost a shit load of Premiership Football to BSkyB and will have a lot of free time on Saturday afternoons, at least (I believe) when the 2009/2010 football season starts.

Didn't Setanta used to carry NASCAR (before BSkyB outbid them for that too) and do a decent job of it?

The least they could do is give it to TV channel Dave. That seems to be a dumping ground for all things BBC related so it'll fit in right at home!

The BBC owns half of Dave, that's why all their stuff ends up there.

Anthony Davidson was a revelation on ITVs award winning coverage of the Hungarian GP in 2006. Sounded like a young Ben Edwards

Interesting - probably why Dave announcers always say "created by the BBc, brought to you by Dave" before EVERY bloody BBc programme

No GP2? One step forward, 3 steps back as far as I'm concerned.

I taught myself to play The Chain on my bass the other night, and you can too!

Go on, impress your mates as BBC bring back the legendary tune...

Here are some instructions thanks to YouTube...

Play as awesome as garage amateur Bennie A, and marvel at his deadly improvised fills.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Sl8MjNBKTs&feature=related

Now go naked, by picking up your best fretless four stringer... (best bit at about 3.10")
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6MB2gFVZ2U

And here's the Mac at it at the height of their powers. Our favourite bass run cracks in about 3.50"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXpVq1hfRmM

Magic!

The new footy contract doesn't comein until the 2010/11 season. Then sentanta have 23 live games instead of the 46 they have currently.

Also the package they lost to Sky is for Mon night games, they still have the Sat teatime slot and they also have 40odd GP rugby games from next year so I doubt they are too bothered about GP2 etc.

They dont need to fill sat afternoon and the veiwing figures for GP2 etc are poor.

Dave or Eurosport more likely I reckon for GP2, Motors TV for Porsche?

Next time someone should tune his guitar for him.

No. No, he didn't.

He did give some fantastic insight a lot of the time and did a good job, but he let himself down by getting sucked into James Allen's 'Jenson Button shout-a-long' and it got a bit embarrassing at the end.

So good, but please don't compare him to Sir Ben.

The viewing figures might be poor overall but in relative terms I think 80,000 viewers at 9am on a Sunday morning in the UK alone for a race series nobody outside of motorsport fandom has heard of and of which almost zero promotion takes place is pretty good going if you ask me.

I hope it goes back to Eurosport, they (or the presenters at least) were very passionate about GP2. I assume ITV outbid them for the 2008 season, rather than it being a lack of interest on Eurosport's behalf.

Keep it away from Dave, I like that I can watch Dragons Den at almost any time of the day or night on that channel!

As for MotorsTV, well that barely even sells itself as being any form of motorsport channel anymore. They seem more interested in running old documentaries about various marques and incessantly playing tedious speedboat races. Do they even have any staff to provide commentary? It doesn't seem to be done inhouse to me. For gawds sake, don't let MotorsTV have GP2. They had their bigtime chance with CART years back and they blew it then. They can have Porsche though, as that's so boring it deserves a channel like MotorsTV!

Yup.


Last few seasons Setanta Ireland would drop a GP2 race from their coverage at a moments notice if it clashed with something else. They didn't even show the championship decider race last season.

Apart from his bass not being in tune - he's playing wrong notes on the riff!

I know, but man is he doing it with passion!

Eh?? That first line is just banal.

Right now Motors has on the ice bikes from the andros trophy this year, next up is a world superbike preview, then British Drag racing, then ARCA race from last year and its all offroad stuff tonight. So it is certainly a motorsport chanel, I know they run some docu's and the jetboats ( which I actually like ) but there is a lot of time to fill in a dedicated channel especially in the off season.

Weither its a good motorsports channel is another debate, It will have a lot of problems with rights (as Eurosport keeps finding out) as it is europewide which makes it difficult to do what it really should be doing.

I'm all for a good mix of motorsports on TV but I'm not sure what the your point is here. A very cheap hour of studio based TV might grab 20x if not 40x the viewers in the same slot and from a much wider demographic, ie more representative of the "customer" base. That's a hard bump to get over for the pro-sport scheduler in the boardroom if numbers or diversity is the metric that has come down from on high.

In fact, the size and quality of BBC's F1 offering is going to make niche motorsport a very hard sell for broadcast TV, and accelerate its move to the net (which is something sponsors are now very interested in because ad feedback and data is so incredibly good).

The problem is GP2 gets 800,000 viewers in some countries.

It was his team winning. The people he worked with - for - and a car he helped to test and develop. Friends and colleagues.

If not at that moment, when else could anyone be allowed to get sucked in to the drama and excitement?

You guys are doing sterling job. I'm more than happy. I'm ecstatic.

My point about MotorsTV (which I should have expanded on) is that they have very little (ANY?) live racing and I'd hate to see them win the GP2 rights but on some cheaper basis that the races would be screened (probably in edited form as with a lot of MotorsTV stuff) several days or weeks after the race takes place (again as with a lot ot MotorsTV stuff).

They used to have CART and as far as I recall quite a lot of the races weren't run live.

As for my commentary comment, can anyone confirm whether they actually have a commentary staff on board or if it is all outsourced? That's very important as if they are going to cover an international championship they need to give it the quality of broadcast it deserves and have dedicated presenters, preferably in front of a camera, and not just some faceless outsourced contract commentator. I doubt they have the money for their own at-track presenting team though so what we'd end up with would be an entirely third-rate product on offer that would most likely start with the green lights and end at the chequered flag and most probably not one race would be shown live.

Eurosport on the other hand would deliver the quality we used to get from them before ITV's half-hearted job. Fair enough I don't recall they ever had people in front of a camera, but the commentary team was second to none for what they did. I've just seen the MotoGP announcement on Autosport so not sure how keen they'd be to bid for GP2 now.

What I don't get is why so many seem to be belittling the (UK) GP2 viewing figures and I don't understand why or what gain is to be had from that.

As long as you are watching it I fail to see what it matters how many others are watching, as long as they keep broadcasting it. You'll never see World Cup Final viewing levels for GP2 so it's naive to ever expect high figures, no matter how much they publicise it. At the end of the day there's just not that many people interested in watching it. You only have to see how many people leave F1 circuits on Saturday after F1 qualifying finishes.

Quite correct - people criticise F1 drivers and teams for being metronomic, and continue to criticise them when they show emotion...

According to ariusuk, before the season has even started the Executive Producer of BBC F1 is leaving.

The problem with that argument is the TV producers/execs dont want to broadcast something which doesn't get many viewers. If they did, they wouldn't be doing their job properly.

The BBC as public service broadcaster sruggle to justify niche sport (olympics aside) and I think that GP2 will be a better fit on Eurosport.

Your point about motors TV is a good one, It really is S**t

so it's dead certain world internet feed this year?

dont get your hopes up lukywill-its unlikely bernie would allow a website to have internet coverage of F1 sessions available worldwide,when knowing that by making each country have their own seperate internet coverage of the various sessions,he can get more money (and you and me both know,that to bernie,money is everything) so it'll likely only be available in the UK

A "world internet feed" no... since only people that pay their TV license will be able to see it.

If you look at his previous posts, he's under the illusion that it will be as easy to circumvent the UK checks as it was with the ITV feed. Unfortunately for lukywill and other people outside of the UK the BBC are much much better at this so they may run into a few problems.

At least it won't affect UK viewers this time if the feed is used by people abroad, I expect most F1 fans here will be watching the practice sessions live on their televisions on the interactive channel - I know I will be.

same here-i dont think ITV made any real effort to stop them,and perhaps bernie knows the BBC will do a better job of ensuring only UK viewers can see it (as mentioned in my previous post,its in bernies interests to make sure they and any other broadcaster stops the coverage being seen on the net outside the region its contracted to,as it means if he wants to sell internet rights,he can bring in more money,which is the most important thing to him)

Eurosport sucked with CART! seriously sucked, GP2 was pretty good. Thing is with Cart half the time the US wasn't even getting it live which caused chaos over here!

Motors used to have the entire TOCA package live, and it did the complete Le Mans (all 24 hrs) twice

It has still to my knowledge, DTM live, V8Supercars live least Bathurst will be , LMS Live, ALMS Live. probably more, I don't work for them so I don't know for sure. They have plenty experience of covering live stuff. As far as I am aware they use the same pool of commentators as Eurosport there is actually very little difference between the two!

The extent of the planned BBC coverage is a pleasant surprise but cant help thinking it will inevitably be cut back as time goes on unless viewing figures are through the roof.

Hello all btw

I posted these links several months back, but its always nice being reminded. Below are links to Jonathan Legard commentating on 5 Live in 2002:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G0MJj8CpGQ - Silverstone 2002
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thtjgl_81J4 - France 2002

It was the lousy picture quality that made me give up watching - I was getting eye strain from trying to make out the cars in the 'fog'.

I am living in continental lEurope (Poland). If I would like to watch it via sattelite dish, what I would need to do to watch that whole BBC package? Fully legally of course. Can I buy some receiver and subscription card registered on UK adress and then use it in other country? Would the full package (with the mystirious 'Red Button") work for me?

Years ago I used to enjoy Bernie TV on Canal+ multichannel platform. After that I tried ORF1 and RTL.

Now after couple of years on local broadcast I am kind of tired with it's quality and I would love to entertain BBC broadcast.

Thanks in advance for advice.

You would need a UK TV License: http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/index.jsp