The Sport Thread

Thanks, having now looked I realise the channel is already there.

Also noticed The F1 Show 2012 preview is on Sky1 HD Saturday 10th March 7am & Sunday 11th March 12pm

Now that Sky are covering F1, they are relaying minute and forensic detail about the rather boring and completely irrelevant vagaries of testing to us on a daily basis on their website.

In a rather pathetic attempt to keep up and say "we're still (sorta) showing F1 too", so are the BBC.

Seems the old adage of Sky only covering the sports they have rights to is true, and of covering them to death too.

The problem with this "forensic detail" they will drive away the casual F1 viewer, who neither understands or cares. I am also of the belief that anyone with an interest in the forensic detail will likely have their head inside an engine and wont be watching the telly.

...to have a dedecated F1 channel is massive overkill, unless they intend to turn it into a nostalgia trip by getting the rights to old races. I'd love to watch some of the Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost era stuff that my dad keeps going on about, "oh formula 1 used to be superb when Senna and Prost were around..." cracked record much.

Surely the biggest reason for the dedicated channel is they don't have to sacrifice certain sport coverage they have the rights to and that do good business for them, from their other channels.

Especially as it's not just live action from the race and qualifying they want to show. And they obviously don't want to waste practice sessions on the red button.

Other reasons include it looks like they're committed to the sport, it will make the customers feel like they're getting more for their money.

The 3-week summer break will be interesting.

Also, this kind of thing has been tried before - Bernie's 6-channel F1 Digital + - and it didn't work then.

It's been discussed in the BH and Salford thread.

That was totally different, this channel is just part of a normal Sky Sports package I believe. F1 Digital + charged people about £12 for each race weekend and didn't offer any races that weren't on free to air TV, although they did offer them commercial free.

Do we think Sky will take the 16:9 graphics feed or the 4:3 safe feed?


I'm presuming you don't have Sky Sports then? Otherwise you would know that more often than not live sporting events take up all four channels at the same time, not to mention At the Races. There are even calls from a few for a fifth Sky Sports channel and a second ESPN channel. Squeezing F1 onto the standard four channels would have been a pretty hard thing to do and would also mean people who only subscribe to Sports 1 or Sports 2 would miss out if, say, one day F1 was on Sports 3 or Sports 4.

I'm sure other people have said this already but having a separate F1 channel means that, if you want, you will be able to find out everything about each race and each driver that hasn't been seen since the days of F1 Digital+. Probably not as much as F1 Digital, but certainly a lot more than in previous years. Some people may call it overkill, but you don't have to watch it.

Probably the 16:9 feed for HD and 4:3 for SD.

If that does happen, then it'll be a little annoying as VM don't have the channel in HD.

It really would have been nice of SS to have at least offered their exclusive races to TUTV on DTT, in place of PickTV for the afternoons, for say £8 a month.

It would have done wonders for the wrecked reputation of News Corp and BSB and would have been concilatory and good PR.

Would it though? Do normal people really think like that?