Misinformation about the cost of watching F1 on Sky is increasingly a pet hate of mine. A piece in the latest Autosport (p65) put the following price on it:
For hard-up Brits, forking out (a minimum) of an extra tenner to watch F1 live was a bitter pill to swallow.
Even with the caveat “at minimum” this amounts to a considerable understatement of how expensive it really is, and one which will not hold true for most of their readers.
The “extra tenner” claim appears to refer to the £10.25 cost of adding Sky’s HD pack (which includes the F1 channel) for one month assuming you already have a Sky subscription.
This of course does not get you a full season of F1 – at most it would have bought three races in 2012, of which at least one would have been live on the BBC anyway.
And it assumes that the viewer in question has Sky already, which is not the case for the majority of people. With a 12-month minimum contract stipulated, the monthly cost of an annual subscription including Sky’s F1 channel remains as described above.
However you play the figures it’s considerably more expensive than Autosport claim: £381 per season, £38.10 per extra live race (over those already shown on the BBC), or £19.05 per race.
I thought the article on the whole was a fair piece but they should have been more realistic about the actual cost of watching the channel instead of cherry-picking a figure that was so optimistic and unrepresentative it looked like it came straight from Sky’s PR literature.
