I thought too that it would go until the end of 2013. The issue may arise then, though. UK has a lot of luck for having the public service television that has, but the worldwide trend is for that to end. It will be the market that will make the choices, which is the same as saying: whoever is able to pay more will get the gig, or whoever is able to profitize more the product will get it (because will be able to pay more). And publicity only, can’t keep up with Costumer Paying (+publicity sometimes).
A solution is to continue with what you have now, which I imagine is to not profitizing at all the product (F1), at least directly, and support the loss just for the bragging rights and the prestige of broadcasting F1 for UK. And some consumer-loyalty that is bond to it (consumers that watch F1 also watch other stuff on the channel that broadcasts it, in this case BBC) But how long can they keep doing it?
One problem that will arise when you finally go to pay TV is this: at that moment, only the fanactic, the addicted F1 consumer will go and subscribe to the pay TV channel. The ocasional user won’t do it, because that’s the kind of consumer that watches if it’s on, but doesn’t care very much to watch it if not, at least not to the point to subscribe a monthly paid channel. And usually there’s more consumers of this ocasional type than the “fanatic” one. The result will be that F1 won’t generate new fans, at least not massively as it does now, because all fanatics were once (at least one time) ocasionals.
Speaking by experience.
That said, maybe ultimately the F1 itself doesn’t want that, won’t allow that to happen, at least not in the huge markets like UK or at least not for big consecutive periods of time.
