SKY F1 HD Channel, Any Chance?

[Teppic]

Originally Posted by muppetman11

I think both the SD and HD channel will arrive however I can see it only being free to Sky Sports subscribers , if Sky keep anything exclusive to its own customers I would imagine it would be interactive features but im guessing.

So long as the SD and HD channels can also be made available as stand alones for a modest fee (e.g. £6 for SD, £10 for HD) then I'd be OK with that. I don't want to have to take the Sky Sports pack just for F1 as it would cost £29.50 for HD and all I would watch on it would be F1, so Sky Sports 1 & 2 would go to waste.

However, while I'm normally an advocate of "no news is good news", I have to say that every day that goes by without an announcement from Virgin Media about getting the F1 channel my heart sinks a little more. I'm even starting to think that the channel will not be available on VM at all.

[denphone]

Originally Posted by Teppic

So long as the SD and HD channels can also be made available as stand alones for a modest fee (e.g. £6 for SD, £10 for HD) then I'd be OK with that. I don't want to have to take the Sky Sports pack just for F1 as it would cost £29.50 for HD and all I would watch on it would be F1, so Sky Sports 1 & 2 would go to waste.

However, while I'm normally an advocate of "no news is good news", I have to say that every day that goes by without an announcement from Virgin Media about getting the F1 channel my heart sinks a little more. I'm even starting to think that the channel will not be available on VM at all.

Do not get down as its a cert to arrive before the start of the 2012 F1 season.

[Teppic]

Originally Posted by denphone

Do not get down as its a cert to arrive before the start of the 2012 F1 season.

The way that Sky sometimes operate I feel like placing a bet that it will arrive after the start of the 2012 F1 season. That way they get to keep their exclusive launch on their platform.

I hope that it does appear. However, the cost of the channel will be an issue.

[devilincarnate]

This could be very good as well?

After India successfully hosted the inaugural Formula One Airtel India Grand Prix in October, Machdar Motorsports floated the idea of an IPL-style motorsport series based on city franchises to promote the sport in India. And it seems, that is not a pipe dream anymore.

http://www.khaleejtimes.com/sport/in...ction=formula1

[denphone]

Originally Posted by Teppic

The way that Sky sometimes operate I feel like placing a bet that it will arrive after the start of the 2012 F1 season. That way they get to keep their exclusive launch on their platform.

I hope that it does appear. However, the cost of the channel will be an issue.

Well we shall see about the costs.

[wakingthedead]

Originally Posted by denphone

Well we shall see about the costs.

I have a feeling Sky Sports F1 HD will be in Sky Premium HD.

[denphone]

Originally Posted by wakingthedead

I have a feeling Sky Sports F1 HD will be in Sky Premium HD.

You could be right.

[Teppic]

Originally Posted by wakingthedead

I have a feeling Sky Sports F1 HD will be in Sky Premium HD.

And you can only take the Sky Premium HD pack if you take Sky Sports 1 & 2 and/or Sky Movies, which again, for me, would push it in to the £29.50 per month territory.

I still hope for stand alone SD and HD channels. Llike I said earlier if priced at say £6 and £10 per month respectively that would be acceptable to me. £29.50 per month would not.

Doesn't mean to say VM won't change that, I'm sure Sky would love people paying £7 a month for one channel.

[denphone]

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/media/ne...-one-deal.html

BBC's Mark Thompson defends controversial Formula One deal

BBC director general Mark Thompson has defended the controversial deal to share Formula One broadcasting rights with Sky from next year, claiming that any other arrangement would have been worse for fans of the sport.

Thompson's comments, revealed in minutes of a meeting of the Commons culture, media and sport select committee, come following stinging criticism of the deal for the BBC to show just half of each season's F1 races live on free-to-air TV from next year to 2018.

Some viewers have objected to Sky's new Sky Sports F1 channel on pay-TV being the only place to enjoy the full F1 season, but Thompson said that the arrangement will save the BBC £150m at a time of major cost cutting.

Committee chairman John Whittingdale MP said that the MPs had received a "very large postbag" of complaints from people about the arrangement and pushed Thompson on whether the BBC looked to strike a deal with a different broadcaster than Sky.

The director general responded by saying that it was the BBC's idea to share rights to Formula One as a way to retain its presence in the sport, while also making "savings that otherwise might have meant deeper cuts in other services".

"We know that Formula One has only fairly recently come back to the BBC; it has been very popular on the BBC. Secondly, we know that Formula One fans ideally do not want Formula 1 to be interrupted by advertising, because of the character of the sport," said Thompson.

"Nor, of course - for the subset of Formula One fans who do not have Sky subscriptions - would they, ideally, like Formula One to go entirely behind a paywall. I believe that the arrangements that we have reached offer very good value to the licence payer, and the experience of Formula One on the BBC will still be very rich."

> BBC announces Formula One coverage plans for 2012

Thompson added: "The first Grand Prix next season, when this new arrangement starts - the Australian Grand Prix - will be live on Sky in the very early hours of the morning. There will be a 75-minute highlights package in peak time on the BBC, which we would expect to reach many more people than the live coverage.

"Talking about changing the arrangements in the existing contract and the extension of that contract, all I would say - and I have of course heard the arguments that perhaps this could have been picked up by another free-to-air broadcaster - is that what we have done has guaranteed that a very large amount of Formula One will still to be free-to-air to the British public for many years to come.

"Had we simply stopped the contract and decided to walk away from Formula One after that, there was a real danger that all of Formula One would have gone behind a paywall."

Channel 4 had made a last ditch bid to pick up the Formula One rights, according to documents released after the BBC-Sky deal was announced. Whittingdale therefore asked why the BBC did not explore a joint deal with Channel 4, which would have kept the sport completely free-to-air.

Thompson replied: "We were quite clear that, to get the economics to work for us, it was going to have to be a pay partner, and this was the only pay partner, credibly, whom we thought we could involve in it - indeed, a pay partner who had expressed interest in this very topic of conversation previously. It was an example of a free-to-air pay partnership, which is not by any means unknown in the market."

He added: "It seems to me that it was not required of us, and given that, in a sense, what we were trying to achieve on behalf of the licence fee payer was a significant saving, actually keeping the confidentiality of the process until it was clear whether the thing was viable and whether all parties to it - including, of course, the rights-holder - were happy, militated in terms of doing it the way we did it."

For its new Sky Sports F1 channel, Sky has mined the majority of the BBC's Formula One team, including lead commentator Martin Brundle and Radio 5 Live's David Croft.

The BBC has also proposed plans to reduce its spending on sports rights by 15% up to 2017, but Thompson feels that the corporation can still hold its own as a broadcaster of live sport.

"We have just, literally in recent days, lost our entire Formula One commentary team to Sky, and there has been, over the years, a regular traffic of sports presenters and commentators from the BBC to ITV, Sky and other broadcasters," he told the MPs.

"What the BBC attempts to do, again, is to get the best value and best impact from its sport. In the current year, we account for around 2% of all the hours of sport broadcast in the UK and 41% of the viewing.

"People still want great sport from the BBC, and the BBC is a surprisingly good and cost-effective way of getting sport to everyone, whether they have the ability to pay for it via a subscription or not."

[Chad]

Whilst I've posted already that I firmly believe SKY F1 will come to Virgin, it seems strange to me that so many people assume we're going to get SKY F1 HD.

HD is still SKY's prize asset which they don't give up easily. It's taken the help of OFCOM and the sale of VMTV to SKY to get the SKY HD channels we have at the moment. We still don't have:

SKY Atlantic HD
SKY Sports 3 HD
SKY Sports 4 HD
SKY Sports News HD
SKY News HD
SKY Box Office HD
SKY Sports Red Button in HD
SKY Anytime in HD (rumoured to be coming real soon)

Unless SKY have an unprecedented change of heart I wouldn't be getting my hopes up about SKY F1 in HD on Virgin.

[toady]

I'd be disappointed if we don't get the HD version, however as long as we get the SD channel for a sensible price in time for the start of the season it would fulfill my needs, at least I'd be able to watch some of the races in HD on the BBC

[Chad]

Originally Posted by toady

I'd be disappointed if we don't get the HD version, however as long as we get the SD channel for a sensible price in time for the start of the season it would fulfill my needs, at least I'd be able to watch some of the races in HD on the BBC

I'm not a big F1 fan so don't fully know the full in's and out's of the BBC deal. Do the BBC have the rights to broadcast half of the races live, and the other half on a delayed basis?

[andy_m]

Originally Posted by Chad

I'm not a big F1 fan so don't fully know the full in's and out's of the BBC deal. Do the BBC have the rights to broadcast half of the races live, and the other half on a delayed basis?

They've got half the races live. Originally it was reported that they would then broadcast a race shown on Sky in it's entirety 3 hours after the event. That's since become a highlights only package on the day of the race. To me, the deal lives or dies for the BBC on the quality of that highlights package.

[dav]

I don't see why Sky set such a premium on HD content. Surely now viewers don't regard HD as anything special. It has become the norm and, as far as I'm concerned, is the default setting. If you're old enough, like I am, it's similar to the change over from B&W to colour TV. Eventually colour became the norm. I think the acceptance of HD (especially with 3D TV being pushed down our throats as 'the next big thing') has been far more rapid than the uptake of colour. Sky can't keep justifying the premium price for HD content much longer, can they?