Commercials are killing F1 on NBC (Update)
10/24/16 My friends, we need to have a talk about Formula 1 in the US. And while I've been down on the quality of racing in F1 lately–as many of you have been–we have a bigger problem: NBC's broadcasts suck writes Jonathan M. Gitlin of ARS Technica.
In fact, the terrible job turned in by Leigh Diffey and his crew has done more to turn me off on the series in recent years than any problems with the actual racing itself, which is odd because NBC (and even Diffey) actually do a decent job with IndyCar. The real problem starts with how much of each race we don't get to see thanks to interminable commercial breaks and pre-recorded videos that should have been saved for the pre- or post-race show.
Motor races are unlike most other forms of televised sports in that there are no scheduled stoppages like football, baseball, soccer, or basketball. Even domestic racing series like NASCAR and IndyCar don't quite suffer in the same way; those two series have evolved to work better with US broadcasters' love for commercials, frequently breaking up the action with full-course caution periods where the racing stops and the cars follow a pace car while whatever accident or incident that caused the caution is dealt with. (By contrast, Formula 1 will often use a local caution, where just a single part of the track is at reduced speed.)
I understand the commercial realities of broadcasting and the need to make money, but viewers in other countries are much better served by their local broadcasters. Part of this has been a move away from broadcast TV to cable or satellite channels behind a paywall. But the UK's Channel 4 has the live rights to 10 of the season's 21 races, and it doesn't interrupt them with ads.
I sat down with a stopwatch and NBC's broadcasts from the last two races (Japan and the USA) to calculate just how bad things are. I decided to ignore the 30-minute pre-race build-up, and I stopped timing when the winner crossed the finish line. I included the split-screen commercial breaks as time lost during the race because NBC's layout only devotes 15.5 percent of the available screen area to showing the racing (and there is of course no sound or commentary). I also didn't count instances where the world feed (the pictures provided by Formula 1 to NBC) cut away to crowd shots, since every broadcaster using that feed has the same issue.
The race from Suzuka, Japan lasted almost exactly 90 minutes, with almost 20 minutes (22 percent) of the race not shown by the US broadcaster. Of that, 16:30 was commercials and another three minutes were b-roll that could or should have been saved for before or after the racing.
Somehow, the data from Austin, Texas was even worse. The race on Sunday lasted 102 minutes. Out of that, NBC broke it up with 20:40 of commercials. Adding insult to injury, there was another 4:40 of b-roll bookends to either side of each break. "Here's 15 seconds of cows in a field. Here's 15 seconds of downtown Austin. Here's 30 seconds of Franklin BBQ. Here's some b-roll of Lewis Hamilton that goes on for over a minute." In total, these asides amounted to a quarter of the entire race.
No, this isn't an acceptable way to watch 25 percent of an F1 race. The incredibly inefficient use of space means only 15 percent of the screen area is used to keep viewers in touch with the action. They may as well not bother.
What really galls is that–presumably due to happenstance–many of those breaks took place when something exciting was happening on track (which, as most F1 viewers will tell you, isn't really a guaranteed thing). This compounds the problem because more live racing then has to be discarded to show replays of the action we missed during commercial breaks.
Of course, things could be worse. We could return to the mid-2000s, when some F1 races were broadcast (ineptly) on CBS thanks to Bernie Ecclestone selling the broadcast rights to a company that produced cartoons. But just because things could be even worse doesn't mean they can't be much better, and I'm not alone in my displeasure. A quick look at tweets to @F1onNBCSports from yesterday shows plenty of anger out there at the horrid job the network is doing in a country that's home to most of F1's bluechip sponsors.
There may be cause for optimism, though. In September, it was announced that the commercial rights to the sport were to be sold from the asset-stripping private equity fund CVC Capital Partners to the US-based Liberty Media Group. Liberty has made some encouraging noises about better use of the Internet and expanding the sport's profile here in the US. So Liberty, if you're listening, this problem would be a good place to start. Jonathan M. Gitlin/ARS Technica