Comments on: ITV Secure Rights To Show F1 Via The Internet

By: kickoff22

kickoff22 — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:56:18 +0000

I always miss the races at the weekend because of family stuff so any opportunity to watch sport online live or otherwise is great news for me.

By: sidepodcast

sidepodcast — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:29:13 +0000

worked fine on a mac. it’s just a flash player, streaming content. no drm, no hassles, worked first time.

only issue was the CDN couldn’t meet the demand.

By: Brendan

Brendan — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:20:48 +0000

ITV doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing. And that is a very good thing ;-). I watched Practice 1 today, on my Mac, from the United States! The player is Flash, so it’ll work on a Mac. Flash on the Mac still sucks, so my MacBook fan was running loudly, but it worked fine.
Also, ITV’s security to keep us non-Brits out is fairly useless. They clearly didn’t design it well, but I think they will after seeing the bandwidth charge for sending Practice out to anyone in the world who wanted to watch. That said, the quality was fairly good.

By: Mike Vail

Mike Vail — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 23:25:02 +0000

I was going to get cable just so I could watch the races this year but don’t want to pay $50 a month just for one channel. The only problem with it being on the web is that its only in the UK. I only wish that SpeedTV would do something like this.

By: F1Punter

F1Punter — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:43:15 +0000

You won’t find a bigger critic of ITV F1 than me (indeed you should see the email that I sent to their production team after Italy last year) but creidt where it is due. Any increase in the number of hours of live F1 is a good thing and embracing the Internet is clearly a positive step too.

By: Oliver White

Oliver White — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:08:05 +0000

Hi francois,
Having the footage available for the off-season would be very handy (for me at least anyway) but I’m pleased ITV are going to keep it up for 30 days. I completely missed the European Grand Prix last year due to being on holiday and could only read about it. I would have loved to have been able to see the whole thing when I got back.

Don’t count on ITV making the service work on something not called Windows Media Player

Bah! Thankfully Mac users can dual-boot into Windows if they have a copy and either Parallels or OS X (10.5). I’m sure some bright spark will find a clever way around it though.

Regarding James Allen: He’s still with ITV, my reference to him at the end was a hope that maybe he wouldn’t be featured in the stream. Admittedly a very large hope, but there none-the-less.

By: francois

francois — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:54:45 +0000

Well , that’s at least a step in the right direction but the idea of DRM totally turns me off downloading any of the “official” content , especially if it’s going to be so restrictive I can only watch it for only the next thirty days.I’m not sure why you’d want to watch a race again within 30 days especially when races happen every other Sunday afternoon .I’d much rather have it to watch in the off season at a time of my choosing.

Don’t count on ITV making the service work on something not called Windows Media Player though.They haven’t done it for their Champions League coverage , neither did they do it for the RWC either.As much as I despise the massively overpriced Mac I do think it’s rather unfair indeed.

I think James Allen will be still with ITV , looking at their relaunched site , he’s still featured as a team member - and there’s nothing to suggest he won’t be in the box either.One hopes that last season it was a case of North One (ITV F1 producers) being blown completely away , when having covered a comparatively niche sport in F1 they found themselves looking at possibly a new British sporting hero.Look forward to finding out indeed on Sunday…