F1 Fanatic

We’ll know how successful the Super Sunday plan is this week.

Now that “The Biggest Loser” is over, “Masterchef” is back – and like almost all reality shows, “Masterchef” is notorious for running overtime. It’s not as bad as the likes of “Australian Idol” (which has been known to go forty minutes overtime), but because it gets ratings, the network is much more lenient with it than they are with other shows. On Thursday night, “Law and Order – Special Victims Unit” was delayed by fifteen minutes because “Masterchef” ran overtime.

Given the reaction from sponsors to the delayed broadcast in the west, a delayed broadcast in the east could go very poorly. So Ten will either have to hold “Masterchef” to its one-hour programming slot to broadcast the race live, or let the show run overtime and bump the Grand Prix back to One.

Watching people sit around and debate food is better than watching them sit around and debate theatre.

If you are in the west it’s on OneHD, so Masterchef won’t affect it! This is thing that puzzles me, ch10 is about as consistent as our government. If the broadcast runs late… they’ll hear about it!

Call me cynical, but it seems that they are creating a “ratings sandwich” for “Touch.”
Network Ten has had a rather poor track record in obtaining quality US drama, which attracts ratings (and therefore advertising revenue). They want to bump up the ratings for the show, so they run Masterchef over time, and use the start of the F1 coverage at the other end to add those viewers to the total for Touch.

Then they can say “look, our decision to put all these awesome shows on has increased viewers by 46%, pay us more money advertisers.”

It sucks, but that’s the way it works when viewers are treated as a commodity, rather than a customer.

But then I’ll miss James or Tom interviewing MW going uuummm eeerr uummm eerrr

And the final verdict is … not bad. It was actually better than usual.

Because Ten moved the broadcast from OneHD to Ten and cut half an hour from the pre-race show, the commentators were clearly gearing the presentation towards newcomers to the sport. So while we got the usual guff about Webber and Ricciardo, mercifully, there were no opinions presented on issues in the sport. When it came time to discuss Hamilton being moved to the back of the grid, the commentators really just informed us that he had been moved back, and left it at that. With the one-hour show, they would take the time to have a debate on the decision. I think the most that happened was Craig Baird said he thought it was disproportionate, and left it at that.

I also noticed that they cut back to Sky faster than they have before. They usually jabber away until the cars start lining up at the end of the formation lap before patching into the Sky feed, but this time we got the full lap and recount of the grid with Sky, which was good. Ten have clearly recognised that Sky’s commentators are the most-equipped to call the race, and have told Rust, Baird and Beattie to hand over sooner. They also stayed with the Sky commentators much later; One always used to cut back to Rust, Beattie and Baird once the results were put up, but this time, they stayed with Sky up to the podium presentation (and maybe even longer; I went to bed beause it was almost midnight) And maybe it was just me, but it seemed like there were less ad breaks, and that those ad breaks were shorter than usual (though I think Ten might have cut one short to catch the replay of the Senna-Schumacher incident).

Overall, as a dedicated fan of Formula 1, I think Ten’s broadcast still needs a lot of work. But from the point of view of an everyman, I think it works quite well. They don’t waste words, they don’t waste time, and there are no misleading opinions being expressed. More advertising would always help, but between Ten’s much-tighter presentation and the quality of the racing we saw, I like to think that someone out there was idly flipping through the channels, stumbled onto the race and stayed hooked.

Taken from @dragoll‘s other thread:

When the 2012 Bahrain Race was shown on standard definition in Australia, I thought it was because of the possibility they wouldn’t actually race there. However, since then, the Spanish GP and now this weekends Monaco GP are going to be shown on the standard definition channel of Channel 10.

This was announced some time ago. I believe Ten revealed their plans as early as the Malaysian Grand Prix.

Their other channel ONE HD which is supposed to be a live sports channel in Australia, will instead show a local Netball Championship game instead.

Netball is a sport. OneHD is fulfilling their purpose by broadcasting it.

And while OneHD started out as a dedicated sports channel, it changed its focus long ago when they found there was no demand for a dedicated sports channel.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that Channel 10 will show the race, but I’m sure its going to be tight scheduling, as their hit tv show, Master Chef will no doubt run over time and squeeze more out of the already skinny 20min F1 pre-race show…

Consider that a blessing. Greg Rust, Cameron McConville and Craig Baird have no idea what they are talking about. At least this way we don’t have to put up with them.

I urge Network 10 to sell the broadcast rights to Foxtel, our only pay-tv provider, so that F1 fans can at least watch live races with some sort of routine, round by round… For christ sake, its Monaco!

Um, all of the races are currently shown live. They’re just shown on Ten rather than on OneHD.

I also think your plea for the races to be broadcast on Foxtel is very rash. For one, not everyone has Foxtel, so Australian viewership will decline (and since Formula 1 is already a niche sport, it could kill a lot of interest). And secondly, you’re clearly upset that the races are not broadcast in high definition. At the end of the day, is this really important? I mean, we get the race one way or the other.