With Formula One management confirming that the sport will begin offering a streaming service in 2018, I’m sure that the development on the service is going to get underway shortly, if it hasn’t already. This is assuming that the service indeed happens, which it very much seems like it will. But there are some features that I feel the service should have.
So, this is an article to anyone on the development team or at Liberty Media (as if any of them read the articles on my website) in which I will outline the fundamental features that I would like to see in a Formula One streaming service.
If the Formula One streaming service has the free practice sessions, qualifying and the race available to stream, that’s great but please offer a membership plan to watch only the races. I never ever miss a race (haven’t missed one since Singapore 2014), but I also never ever watch the other sessions in the weekend. It’s not that I don’t find them interesting to watch, it’s just that I have a hard enough time getting up at 3am to watch the race. I don’t really feel like getting up at 3am to watch practice on Friday, 3am to watch qualifying on Saturday and then again at 3am on Sunday to watch the race. And I’m pretty sure that my boss would get pretty annoyed with me if I skipped work on Friday and Saturday to watch the other sessions.
I’m not saying “don’t stream the other sessions”, I’m just asking the development team not to offer just a single payment option to watch every session. Offer some choices. Like a per session payment, full weekend bundle with discount and maybe even a qualifying-race bundle with discount. I don’t want to be tied to my TV and forced to watch every session in order to get my money’s worth.
One of the most important features that I think the Formula One website video player is missing is the ability to adjust the quality. Instead they have it locked to automatically detect the quality, which means that during video playback I’m either watching a freezing pile of mess or a something so blurry it makes me feel like I need glasses. Giving users the ability to toggle between 1080p or 720p or 480p gives them the control to pick the quality that will give the best video playback.
For example, if I were to try and live stream a 1080p video, I’m fairy certain that my computer would explode. If I stream a 720p video, then I may get occasional freezing, but would generally be ok with it. If I stream 480p, then there are no playback issues and it will play smooth all the way to the finish.
My point is that not everyone has great internet that is capable of streaming crystal-clear video. Some people need to settle for slightly lower quality and not having that option could drive many people away.
Although it’s not really a must have feature, it would be really nice to have the ability to listen to an audio-only version of the broadcast. The reason I say this is because some people may listen to the race while driving or maybe they just don’t have enough mobile data left on their plan to watch the race, but they could listen to the audio only.
Speaking from my own personal experience, I have experienced a power outage just before the race was about to start. Unfortunately, no Canadian mobile carriers offer unlimited data, so I have very little data on my plan. And of course the outage happened near the end of my billing cycle, so I had even less data remaining on my plan. I was able to watch the entire race (albeit resulting in some overage fees) in the lowest video quality, but it would have been nice to have the option to listen to the race rather than watching it because it would have wasted a lot less of my data.
I get the whole issue with rebroadcasting races, since Sky has the majority of the rights for old races. However, I would love to see the Formula One streaming service have an option to watch the race afterwards for a reduced cost in an on-demand format. I’m not asking FOM to dig up old archives from the ‘60s and make those races available, but it would be nice to watch a race that you may have missed.
They don’t even have to have all of that season’s races available. I think that just having the previous two or three available would be sufficient. It could attract news fans to the sport too because it would allow them to watch a race for the first time without there actually having to be a live race in progress.
I know that people in my area would like it since races like Japan are on at awful hours in the night. It wouldn’t help me since I watch every race live so that I can provide better coverage of the races on this website, but it would help others. It could also allow fans that maybe only watch one or two races a year because of the time differences to watch every race in the season if they wanted to.
I’d also like to see a live comment system for users. I think that it needs to be sorted by language since Formula One has a lot of fans around the world. I think that the whole argument about it being hard to filter out the not so family friendly content is irrelevant. It’s not that hard to create a strong profanity filter and disabling the ability to post links is super easy.
A live comment system would give the fans a good environment to discuss the race. Mix that with the live commentary feed from the Formula One website’s live commentary and timing feature and you would have a great tool.
Don’t get me wrong though. As the moderator of an online Formula One community myself, I know how quickly a community can turn toxic, so there would be downsides with this feature, but I think that the positives out-weight the negatives.
These are just a few of my suggestions to the team that will be designing the F1 streaming platform. I know that they are more than likely not going to read this at all, but in the off chance that they are, I like to think that my ideas are worth adding to the final product.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer or company. Assumptions made in any analysis contained within this article are not reflective of the position of any entity other than the author.
