Drive to Survive just lost 20% of it's viewers.

Do you guys actually watch that? I watched the first one but it's so painful. Especially that journalist guy who talks like everything he says is MEGA IMPORTANT.

 

I made it through two seasons but had to give up. The sensationalising way DTS is ruining F1 bothers me too much. People watch that shit and come to a race expecting action every second due to the false advertising of DTS.

 

It's a shame though, Gunther was like the human face of F1 and I think most 'Haas' fans were actually Gunther Steiner fans.

 

Yeah - that guy is annoying, but he becomes less of the focus in the later series, as the drivers and teams get in the chair a bit more.

I found DTS interesting becuase it opened up the internal world of F1 a bit more than you'd normally see as a "casual" fan. I used to watch F1 with my Dad almost religiously, attended the British GP once or twice, but was never a "mega-fan": I was just interested because I'm into cars (and bikes, and racing) - but not "obsessive". DTS appeals to the non-obsessive people who are "interested" in F1 and racing, but have lots of other interests. So - for fully obsessive fans, it's a bit lightweight and ephemeral.

I can see the argument that it presents a skewed portrayal, and it does, but I think that's balanced by the fact that you get to see the internal workings, and the personal interviews that you wouldn't always see unless you were an obsessive fan (ie someone who pays for the full PlanetF1 experience, etc).

It's just a different way of attracting interest to the sport and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's interesting though that I tried to watch the equivalent MotoGP series and found it utterly uninteresting (despite MotoGP being far, far more exciting to watch as racing). I still haven't figured out why the MotoGP series is uninteresting to me (a dyed-in-the-wool biker).

 

Question for the UK residents: How are you going watch your F1 races this year?

Last year, I had access to a NowTV subscription which allowed us to watch F1 live (and on repeat), but my friend has moved on and so that option is not open to me anymore.

I object to having to pay something like £40 or more per month for a Sky or NowTV subscription just to watch F1. (I have zero interest in any of the other channels or shows on Sky, and also have an objection to paying yet more money into Murdoch's empire).

Does anyone know of any internet streaming services that will stream the F1 races (preferably live)?

 

I have Sky Sports which gives me Sky F1. I do watch a bit of golf and football too, though. I pay £25 per month for Sky Sports but that's obviously on top of the basic package, Netflix and everything else.

 

Is the F1 TV app subscription not available in the uk? I pay £11 to watch all the races live and reruns of years of races in the archive included in the price. It works very well.

 

What's the overall cost of the Sky package?

We currently subscribe to Netflix, Prime, and Disney (I think that's all of them...): Netflix is about a tenner a month, Prime is what... £90 a year now? (I do buy from Amazon regularly so get the free postage benefits), and Disney is about a tenner a month.

So - JUST for F1, I'm loathe to spend another £40 or £50.....

 

Is that through another supplier or is it totally independant? Which commentry team do you get?

this page : https://www.formula1.com/en-gb/subscribe-to-f1-tv seems to indicate that you don't actually get more than "live timings"... unless I'm reading it wrong?

Ah - you only get live race feeds in the US.

 

It is F1 TV the official way to watch F1, provided and managed directly from Formula 1. You go directly to the source of Formula 1 themselves to stream through their cheap service. I use the app on Apple TV and watch the races on the 135" screen, works flawlessly

https://f1tv.formula1.com/

Edit: commentary? I have no idea, some guys speaking English. Occasionally they are joined by David Culthard

 

CH4 highlights. Seems adequate, honestly. The odd time I get to see a full race it seems too long. Especially since we have red flags every five minutes

 

It's not cheap, but Sky is my main package and I also get a discount off my broadband for having TV as well. Just focusing on TV package (excluding broadband), Sky Stream in two rooms costs me £93 per month and breaks down as follows (some of these have in contract discounts applied). In addition, I also pay for Prime (but would do so for the deliveries even if I never watched Prime Video). Also, the Sky subscription to Cinema below includes free access to Paramount+.

• Sky Ultimate TV - Sky Entertainment with Netflix - £26.00
• Netflix Premium - £8.00 (this allows multi-user/multi-device)
  
• Sky Sports - £25.00
• Sky Cinema - £11.00
• Sky Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos - £6.00
• Whole Home - £12.00 (allows you to connect multiple Stream boxes)
• Ad skipping - £5.00

 

And in Sweden because it works for me.

I guess then that the greedy fakkas of Sky has bought some rights to be the only ones allowed to show F1 for an expensive price tag. But that should be easily overcome using a VPN, just set your location to US (or Sweden )

 

I think sometimes they use the ITV commentary and sometimes the Sky commentary.

 

I just looked into it and I think I could get the Sky Stream service for £46 a month....... (which includes netflix), but our internet speeds are "only just" fast enough: we're too far from any exchanges to get regular broadband connections* and so we have a 4G modem/router instead. It's "fast enough" for most things - but the Sky Stream Puck legal bit recommends 25Mbps minimum.... we only just get that!

Need to think about it a bit more.....





* When we moved here I had a conversation with BT that went something like this :

BT: Your residence is over 4kms from the nearest exchange, we can't guarantee anything more than about 2Mbps connection speeds.
Me: Well, that's barely enough speed for basic internet, So - what do you recommend can be done about that?
BT: Move house.


(absolutely true).

 

That's crap. I only went with Sky Stream recently when I moved house - the engineer couldn't get a dish up in the right place with line of sight to the satellite. It's pretty much the same as SkyQ (although you can't record) but my internet speed is 500Mbs, so I can't tell you how it performs on something much worse. To be honest, SkyQ is probably the way to go if that works for you.

 

And there's the other rub... we're in a listed building, so adding a satellite dish is "problematic".

Beginning to look like SkyStream is the only option, and we'd just have to hope that the internet speeds are fast enough to serve it satisfactorily. (The other streaming services we currently have seem to work ok, except for the occasional drop-out)

 

Actually, Sky Stream worked absolutely fine on a 4G router I used temporarily when I moved house whilst waiting for my broadband to be set up. Would this be an option for you to get faster internet? Or is your 4G/5G signal crap as well?

Sympathise with the dish - mine is a new build and there was a covenant saying we couldn't put dishes on the front of the house. Side would have been fine, but no line of sight to sattelite. They wanted to mount it on the back garden fence and run a cable all the way round to the front of the house but I wasn't having that!

 

We currently get between 15 and 25Mbps downloads (and about the same, +10, uploads - go figure), depending on ... err.. I'm not sure tbh, but weather doesn't really help. Ironically I can actually SEE the mobile phone mast about 300metres away, from the window the router is situated in (it's actually held onto the glass with suction pads), but the signal still varies with weather!

 

Wife records this for me,- I’m usually in the pub when it’s aired, -but I can watch it if I hear good things about the race, or I can fast forward looking for more than one car on screen,
I don’t always bother, there are times I just delete the recording.