Formula 1 starts this weekend, so where’s that new streaming service?

Enlarge (credit: Ferrari)

In 2016, US-based Liberty Media bought the commercial rights to that most spendy of motor sports, Formula 1. In doing so, it promised to bring the 21st century to a racing series that, when it came to fan engagement, might as well have been trapped in 1995.

One of those changes has been a desire to offer a streaming service for fans, but, with the season-opening race taking place March 25-this Sunday-the service is conspicuous by its absence. The launch of F1 TV Pro, which would have cost around $8 to $12 for a race weekend, is now on hold.

Until this year, the lack of a streaming service was mostly down to a combination of apathy and contracts. Bernie Ecclestone, who ran the sport for decades, got there by buying up the broadcast rights to each race, eventually packaging them all together in a move that made him extremely wealthy and changed the sport into the polished, glossy, elitist thing it is today. And there was a time when Ecclestone even embraced progress. In the late 1990s, he launched a pay-per-view channel called F1 Digital+, which didn't take ad breaks and offered multiple video and audio feeds.

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