Liberty Media has been talking about an online streaming platform for a while now and they have finally released promotional footage of what it will look like. It seems to be missing some of the features that I wanted to see in the streaming platform, but it looks awesome!
The platform will be called F1 TV and will be launched this season. The streaming service will include commercial-free live streams of every race with commentary in English, French, German and Spanish. It has not been specified whether the commentary will be inhouse or leased from other broadcasts. The previous race highlights videos on the website include the commentary from the Sky Sports F1 team, so it’s expected that the commentary will likely come from Sky Sports F1.
The service will also provide access to all 20 onboard cameras in the race and appears to have features like head to head onboard camera viewing also. All the sessions for each Formula One race will be available, along with live races from some of the support series like F2 and GP3. The press release for the streaming service also says that “Subscribers will be able to choose the content they view and how and when they access it” but there was no mention of an on demand viewing portion of the service.
This statement could be referring to the device that you will use to watch the service. The service will be available on your web browser, but the sport will also release apps for Amazon, Apple and Android mobile devices or TV devices.
The price for the streaming service is close to the £2.99 per race price that I suggested in October of last year. The F1 TV Pro service will cost between USD$8-$12 and will also have annual payment options available, which would likely offer savings. The sport will also continue to offer the cheaper package that they have previously offered with access to the live timing, radio commentary and premium videos for each race.
The service will be launched into “nearly two dozen” areas. A full list of countries was not included, although the press release did specify that it will be available in Germany, France, the United States, Mexico, Belgium, Austria, Hungary and “much of Latin America”.
This service looks absolutely stunning! I am looking forward to trying it out (although it worries me that Canada was not one of the countries confirmed in the press release). However, I think that the service may have missed the mark on pricing options. This was a topic that I discussed in a previous article about the new streaming service in November. The press release doesn’t hint towards different packages with cheaper pricing.
Using myself as an example, I love to watch the races live, but I don’t watch the other sessions that often and I certainly don’t watch any of the support series on a regular basis. So if the service is offered at USD$8-$12 per month and gives access to all of that great content, will there be a cheaper option that gives access to the just the live races?
Don’t get me wrong, USD$8-$12 would be a phenomenal price for the amount of content that will be offered on the service, but why should someone pay USD$8-$12 a month if they are only going to watch a tiny portion of the content? People will look at the price and say “I’m not going to pay that to only watch some of the content”. There needs to be multiple tiers of F1 TV Pro for people that only want to watch the races or maybe only want to watch the F1 content. There is no official pricing option available to view yet, but the press release doesn’t seem to hint at any form of variable pricing, which is disappointing.
