Liberty Media

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Row Man Gross-Gene
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Liberty Media

Post by Row Man Gross-Gene »

I've wanted to discuss this for a few years, especially how I interact with the sport now that I subscribe to F1TVPro. But there's a lot to unpack. So I'm just going to jump in and offer my thoughts without thinking too hard about this. Please offer your thoughts.

1. Liberty compared with the predecessors. Prior to Liberty, it was CVC Capital Partners with Bernie as the CEO. While it was very Bernie-centric, CVC took so much money out of the sport every year, that it hamstrung the sport terribly, just true vulture capital in the worst sense. I doubt anyone misses them. Bernie is more of a mixed bag. Without CVC sucking the life from the sport, would he have done a decent job in the age of streaming etc.? I don't know, but I doubt it.

2. The whole paywall/free-to-air/streaming question. This is a bit tough for me to understand since I'm in the US, the free-to-air ship sailed decades ago. Almost noone here gets TV signal over the air, and the last time a significant number of people did was the 1980s. So I'm going to be paying one way or another. It was a somewhat complicated calculus to decide to subscribe to the F1TVPro service (starting last season), but now that I have, I've absolutely no regrets and my viewing has gone way up. Before the subscription I had never watched a testing or practice session ever, and I could count the number of qualifying sessions I'd watched on one hand. Now I watch pretty much every qualifying and a fair number of testing and practice days. Plus, I've watched a good number of races from the times of my life I wasn't following F1 because of the large archive. That's not to say that I don't regularly curse software bugs or other issues, but I haven't missed a race, because I can always watch later. (in fact I almost never watch live)

3. The 2022 regulations (and the cost cap). To say that I'm looking forward to the new regulations is an understatement. Bringing back ground effect, cutting significant turbulence etc. is exciting. No way that asset-strippers like CVC would have spent a dime on an initiative like this. Liberty didn't have to be super altruistic, it is in their own best interest to improve things in this area, CVC was never going to hang on to the sport long term, so they never cared. There are probably some experts who think the next set of regs won't change much, but I've not heard of any who think it will make for worse racing, and most are positive. But even if the regs are a net neutral, the budget cap will be a gain in my opinion.

4. Less anal-retentiveness about content. Sites and videos and other stuff aren't getting banned every five minutes like before. It's almost like allowing fans to do their thing makes them happier about spending money on the sport they love (at least it has for me). That said, maybe Liberty is being hard on things in a less visible way, if so, please speak up.

5. Liberty are still a corporation, no matter how convenient and nice some of their services are. They inherited some contracts with races in countries with repressive regimes, but they also added to the number which is bad.

There is more, and I hope others will expand the discussion, but it's one that I think is worth having. Please add your thoughts!
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Rob Dylan
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Re: Liberty Media

Post by Rob Dylan »

As a simple armchair critic, the most important point you made for me is Number 4. It is so nice that there is now a berth of F1-related content on the internet, especially YouTube. Before 2017 or so there was NOTHING. It's hard to believe just how bad F1 was at going online whilst Bernie and CVC were around. As you say, vulture capital of the worst kind.

The going has been tough, as the sport has basically lost 10 years of online presence which it has had to make up. But it is doing a fine job, putting up races, highlights, interviews, top 10s, that kind of thing. It's the kind of bitesize content that is needed to get people interested in watching in the first place!


Other people here must remember the old days of watching an old F1 video of like "super famous crash in 2011" and the video is in 144p and that's the only one there is. Unbelievably bad.

Simply put, F1's adoption of the """internet""" has been a long time coming, and Liberty Media are currently delivering on that front.

That is the only noticeable and greatly positive change I can think of immediately.
Murray Walker at the 1997 Austrian Grand Prix wrote:The other [Stewart] driver, who nobody's been paying attention to, because he's disappointing, is Jan Magnussen.
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Row Man Gross-Gene
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Re: Liberty Media

Post by Row Man Gross-Gene »

Yeah, I probably undersold the importance of that aspect of Liberty’s stewardship. I don’t know if it was ever said, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the previous regime who was directly responsible for the destruction of this very site’s predecessor. Would there have been a WTF1 or Chainbear on YouTube during Bernie’s days? No feckin way.

That said, what are the weaknesses of Liberty, or what other aspects are worthy of discussion?
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Re: Liberty Media

Post by mario »

It's a worthwhile discussion, as it is one of those situations where I feel there are both positives and negatives to the way that Liberty Media is approaching the management of the sport.

Row Man Gross-Gene wrote:3. The 2022 regulations (and the cost cap). To say that I'm looking forward to the new regulations is an understatement. Bringing back ground effect, cutting significant turbulence etc. is exciting. No way that asset-strippers like CVC would have spent a dime on an initiative like this. Liberty didn't have to be super altruistic, it is in their own best interest to improve things in this area, CVC was never going to hang on to the sport long term, so they never cared. There are probably some experts who think the next set of regs won't change much, but I've not heard of any who think it will make for worse racing, and most are positive. But even if the regs are a net neutral, the budget cap will be a gain in my opinion.

With regards to the technical regulations, Adrian Newey and Peter Prodromou have, in separate discussions, indicated they think that the 2022 regulations aren't going to be all that effective.

In the case of Newey, his position towards the 2022 regulations has been fairly persistently negative - he's been of the opinion that they have become incredibly prescriptive and restrictive and have removed a significant degree of freedom that the designers used to have (hence his comments about the rules being "a shame" and "a missed opportunity").

His attitude is that, even if they do make it easier to overtake, the new rules are a very clumsy way of doing so due to them forcing a standard design philosophy on all teams - hence him derisively saying it's a case of F1 turning into GP1 - and his opinion is that they might well fail to achieve that goal anyway. He's also suggested that, rather than reducing the gaps between teams, the new rules will probably initially widen those gaps. (I'd suggest the following video as being worth a watch - it's around the 40 minute mark that they start discussing the new regulations). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmb02SBmE1I

Prodromou has also given a similar opinion, in that he's also commented that the regulations have the intention of proscribing a standard design philosophy that erodes creative freedoms - like Newey, he's also somewhat doubtful that the regulations will be as effective as it is claimed they will be. He's suggested the only thing that the new regulations seem to have been effective at is making it a lot easier to copy what others are doing - because the new rules force a standard design philosophy, it makes parts a lot more interchangeable from one car to another.

To reinforce how prescriptive the regulations are, over at F1 Technical, they've been comparing how Article 3, which is the section on bodywork, has evolved over the years. https://www.f1technical.net/features/23 ... fa327f0067

Whilst it has been steadily getting longer, 2022 is almost off the scale compared to previous years - it is 60% longer than in previous years and clocks in at around 16,000 words, making it the lengthiest change in regulations since 1988.

To illustrate the point, they have shown how the regulations define the bodywork zones that teams will be allowed to design their cars within for 2022:
Image
If you thought the regulations were already prescriptive enough, well, as you can see from the above image, the 2022 regulations leave very little room for manoeuvre within them.
Martin Brundle, on watching a replay of Grosjean spinning:
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Re: Liberty Media

Post by Frogfoot9013 »

mario wrote:(I'd suggest the following video as being worth a watch - it's around the 40 minute mark that they start discussing the new regulations).

I think you forgot to put in the link to the video you mentioned here. May you place it in so I can watch it? :)

Regarding Newey's criticisms about the changes turning F1 into GP1 - that has kind of already been something that F1 (and indeed motorsports in general) has been slowly trending towards over the past few decades, whether we like it or not, though in F1 that process has certainly accelerated over the past ten years. How much of that is avoidable and how much of it was always inevitable, I am not entirely sure however.
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mario
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Re: Liberty Media

Post by mario »

Frogfoot9013 wrote:
mario wrote:(I'd suggest the following video as being worth a watch - it's around the 40 minute mark that they start discussing the new regulations).

I think you forgot to put in the link to the video you mentioned here. May you place it in so I can watch it? :)

Regarding Newey's criticisms about the changes turning F1 into GP1 - that has kind of already been something that F1 (and indeed motorsports in general) has been slowly trending towards over the past few decades, whether we like it or not, though in F1 that process has certainly accelerated over the past ten years. How much of that is avoidable and how much of it was always inevitable, I am not entirely sure however.

Apologies - the link to the interview is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmb02SBmE1I (I'll edit the original post to include the link).

It is certainly true that regulation growth has been going on for a long time, and is perhaps inevitable with the evolution of a sport over time as attempts are made to limit areas that could result in excessive spending or in development that is deemed wasteful or even harmful for varying reasons. Indeed, that F1 Technical article does acknowledge that point noting that the regulations have steadily become bulkier over the years as tightening has occurred to limit certain avenues of development.

However, this time around, those looking at the rule package have commented that the rules package has a far stronger emphasis on pushing a particular aesthetic and pushing for a standardised design philosophy.

Whereas previous rule sets have tended to be more reactionary in nature - i.e. often being written to counter a particular item - thus rule set has made a conscious decision to take design freedom away from the teams with a deliberate intent of marginalising them. The standardisation in design is being used as the means of enforcing the budget cap, but also as a means of trying to impose equalisation through standardisation.

In this case, the length of the regulations has grown very disproportionately - about 60% longer if you look at just the main text, but with a lot of details shifted to annexes, the true growth in the rules is about 230%. This time around, it is a much more overt and much more intentional decision, rather than being kind of more of a reactionary move.

To some extent, it is reflective of the FIA also seemingly having a philosophy about homogenising all tiers of motorsport and narrowing down their scope to create an ordered and structured progression path that drivers have to follow, and making the regulations much more prescriptive to enforce that.

The superlicence regulations have been used as one means of pushing drivers towards specific series, as the lure of wanting to get into the top rank series has made only a few series worth competing in now. Junior series have also become less diverse - not only with a number of series now being marginalised by the FIA's superlicence changes, but also the FIA tending to want to promote series with monopoly suppliers.

It does also make me wonder what impact that is having on the diversity of the designers within the motorsport sector as well. If you think about it, there is a rather marked reduction in independent chassis suppliers - pretty much every single major European series is now in Dallara's hands, with Mechachrome having a sizeable chunk of the engine supply market as well.

Where are the opportunities for junior designers meant to come from in the future? It feels like the FIA doesn't particularly have a plan for that at best, and at worst seems likely to actively reduce opportunities for designers as the increased homogenisation means that most work is being given to a small set of monopoly suppliers.
Martin Brundle, on watching a replay of Grosjean spinning:
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Re: Liberty Media

Post by Wallio »

The whole paywall/free-to-air/streaming question. This is a bit tough for me to understand since I'm in the US, the free-to-air ship sailed decades ago. Almost noone here gets TV signal over the air, and the last time a significant number of people did was the 1980s. So I'm going to be paying one way or another. It was a somewhat complicated calculus to decide to subscribe to the F1TVPro service (starting last season), but now that I have, I've absolutely no regrets and my viewing has gone way up. Before the subscription, I had never watched a testing or practice session ever, and I could count the number of qualifying sessions I'd watched on one hand. Now I watch pretty much every qualifying and a fair number of testing and practice days. Plus, I've watched a good number of races from the times of my life I wasn't following F1 because of the large archive. That's not to say that I don't regularly curse software bugs or other issues, but I haven't missed a race, because I can always watch later. (in fact, I almost never watch live)


Can't agree more. F1TV is a godsend. I haven't missed a session all season, including FP3 's (which I NEVER) watched. Even watched some F2 last year and this. It amazes that Indycar and NASCAR, or even WEC haven't done this. It's worth the $79 just to be able to sleep in on Sundays here in the US.

I often hear people talking about the current US coverage of F1 (ESPN, I think?) and it blows me away that anyone would still watch F1 on TV. In America anyway.
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Re: Liberty Media

Post by Rob Dylan »

Wallio wrote:
The whole paywall/free-to-air/streaming question. This is a bit tough for me to understand since I'm in the US, the free-to-air ship sailed decades ago. Almost noone here gets TV signal over the air, and the last time a significant number of people did was the 1980s. So I'm going to be paying one way or another. It was a somewhat complicated calculus to decide to subscribe to the F1TVPro service (starting last season), but now that I have, I've absolutely no regrets and my viewing has gone way up. Before the subscription, I had never watched a testing or practice session ever, and I could count the number of qualifying sessions I'd watched on one hand. Now I watch pretty much every qualifying and a fair number of testing and practice days. Plus, I've watched a good number of races from the times of my life I wasn't following F1 because of the large archive. That's not to say that I don't regularly curse software bugs or other issues, but I haven't missed a race, because I can always watch later. (in fact, I almost never watch live)


Can't agree more. F1TV is a godsend. I haven't missed a session all season, including FP3 's (which I NEVER) watched. Even watched some F2 last year and this. It amazes that Indycar and NASCAR, or even WEC haven't done this. It's worth the $79 just to be able to sleep in on Sundays here in the US.

I often hear people talking about the current US coverage of F1 (ESPN, I think?) and it blows me away that anyone would still watch F1 on TV. In America anyway.
This perspective is interesting. As someone living around Europe I haven't sensed the benefits that Liberty Media (and you) are pointing out, that streaming and replays and on-demand greatly help the audiences who have to watch the races at really inconvenient times.
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Re: Liberty Media

Post by yannicksamlad »

As above - I hadnt really considered how good F1 tV might be for someone who otherwise has the sort of coverage that comes with so many ad breaks and pop-ups and ad-digressions that the main event is really quite ruined as an immersive spectacle. And my experience of US TV is that it is like that.
Streaming is still so full of technical issues - from broadcaster to viewer that I am so glad my racing comes down a cable to a set-top box thanks to a a reputable experienced broadcaster on an established platform.
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Re: Liberty Media

Post by mario »

Rob Dylan wrote:
Wallio wrote:
The whole paywall/free-to-air/streaming question. This is a bit tough for me to understand since I'm in the US, the free-to-air ship sailed decades ago. Almost noone here gets TV signal over the air, and the last time a significant number of people did was the 1980s. So I'm going to be paying one way or another. It was a somewhat complicated calculus to decide to subscribe to the F1TVPro service (starting last season), but now that I have, I've absolutely no regrets and my viewing has gone way up. Before the subscription, I had never watched a testing or practice session ever, and I could count the number of qualifying sessions I'd watched on one hand. Now I watch pretty much every qualifying and a fair number of testing and practice days. Plus, I've watched a good number of races from the times of my life I wasn't following F1 because of the large archive. That's not to say that I don't regularly curse software bugs or other issues, but I haven't missed a race, because I can always watch later. (in fact, I almost never watch live)


Can't agree more. F1TV is a godsend. I haven't missed a session all season, including FP3 's (which I NEVER) watched. Even watched some F2 last year and this. It amazes that Indycar and NASCAR, or even WEC haven't done this. It's worth the $79 just to be able to sleep in on Sundays here in the US.

I often hear people talking about the current US coverage of F1 (ESPN, I think?) and it blows me away that anyone would still watch F1 on TV. In America anyway.
This perspective is interesting. As someone living around Europe I haven't sensed the benefits that Liberty Media (and you) are pointing out, that streaming and replays and on-demand greatly help the audiences who have to watch the races at really inconvenient times.

It is an interesting situation - those who did have access to fairly decent quality free to air services would probably miss that a lot more, whilst a relatively poor, or just complete absence of a free to air service and access to decent quality internet connections would make streaming attractive, or even just instinctive.

It does tie in to the desire to watch at a time convenient for yourself as well, rather than at the time that the race occurs due to it being on the opposite side of the planet - the time zone difference has been given as a reason for it being less popular outside of Europe, with the races optimised to run at times best for viewing there.

That said, a shift more towards streaming does create a somewhat difficult position for the sport when that would run counter to what a number of the subscription TV channels would like - it's been commented that, for organisations like Sky, live sports is really one of the few areas where they've been able to hold off the likes of streaming organisations like Netflix, so they are prepared to pay a premium that will be hard to ignore.

In the case of Sky, they are in many ways able to exert a noticeable amount of influence on the sport because they have an extremely disproportionate influence on the income of the sport. I believe that their payments to Liberty Media make up nearly a third of the entire turnover of the sport, with the biggest chunk of that coming from Sky UK. Whilst it might be possible to open up other markets to streaming on the basis that the income from streaming will probably be similar to, or perhaps even outweigh, what they might have earned from selling those rights to a subscription based broadcaster, I can't see them wanting to jeopardise the income from Sky - it's worth too much to the sport, so it literally pays to keep them happy.

It's why the current tinkering with the qualifying format is going ahead - Sky wasn't able to push through it's preferred option of a reverse sprint race, but they do have the influence on Liberty Media to get them to push through a similar initiative with the plan of then using that to justify a higher subscription cost. With the oversized influence of Sky, I can see Sky pushing for more "innovations" in their quest to keep the subscribers coming in.
Martin Brundle, on watching a replay of Grosjean spinning:
"The problem with Grosjean is that he want to take a look back at the corner he's just exited"
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Re: Liberty Media

Post by Row Man Gross-Gene »

I’m glad you brought up sky, because F1tv uses the sky commentary feed for English language. And espn uses sky as well in the US (or at least used to). I’m very happy about this as I love hearing Brundle. But also, someone in the US could probably be forgiven for believing F1TV and Sky were the same thing with how intertwined they seem to be here. But since they aren’t the same thing, it causes some issues with the broadcast when they go to Ant and he’s describing something where it seems likely that sky is showing a replay that we’re not getting on F1TV.
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Re: Liberty Media

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Row Man Gross-Gene wrote:I’m glad you brought up sky, because F1tv uses the sky commentary feed for English language. And espn uses sky as well in the US (or at least used to). I’m very happy about this as I love hearing Brundle. But also, someone in the US could probably be forgiven for believing F1TV and Sky were the same thing with how intertwined they seem to be here. But since they aren’t the same thing, it causes some issues with the broadcast when they go to Ant and he’s describing something where it seems likely that sky is showing a replay that we’re not getting on F1TV.



I think that may be why F1TV is pushing their "Pit Lane Channel" feed so hard this year. They have their own separate booth. Not being a fan of Brundle and Crofty, I'm going to give the PLC a go this week (figure the same track can give a good blow-by-blow comparison).
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