Again, No Qualifying For UK Audiences

Again, No Qualifying For UK Audiences

Yet again, it appears that ITV will not show Qualifying live on their terrestrial channel, ITV1. Instead, they are showing a delayed broadcast over on ITV76 or something. (It’s actually ITV4, in case my sachasm wasn’t obvious!) It is delayed because the fourth channel in ITVs portfolio doesn’t start broadcasting until 6pm, and so it isn’t even going to be live.

Once again, I find myself asking why ITV continue to show F1. I appreciate they have a contract, but it is clear to me that incidences like this only show that ITV don’t care about the service they provide to loyal F1 fans. Do they really think that we don’t care about things like this? I can’t have sky because there are trees too close to my home, and at the moment, I couldn’t be bothered getting Cable or a set-top box because I think 5 terrestrial channels is enough. But forcing Formula One viewers to either purchase such an additional equipment as Sky or Cable, or miss qualifying altogether is just plain wrong.

When the BBC take over again (because I am sure they will) I would really like to see an addition to the contract that simply says: “All qualifying events and races will be shown live. Absolutely live and completely uninterrupted.” It’s not a hard thing to do. It isn’t like people aren’t going to watch qualifying. The FIA atempted to make it more watchable or this year by tweaking the rules, but people won’t watch it if they can’t!

Keith from F1Fanatic has also followed up his posts from last week with another regarding the broadcast of the US Grand Prix this coming weekend, and I am including the list of contact details that Keith has put together. Below are the ways you can contact ITV to voice your opinion. Thanks to F1Fanatic for keeping us up-to-date with the debacale that is ITV.

You can contact ITV via:

– Telephone: 0870 600 6766

– E-mail: dutyoffice@itv.com

– Post: Duty Office, Gas Street, Birmingham, B1 2JT

7 comments

  • so here’s what’s happening.

    bernie wants to get his tv station going again (so that he can control eveything). he tried it before but it failed because of a number of factors – one being that there was already a perfectly good feed on terrestrial tv in the uk.

    if by chance the public are up in arms over the quality of the current feed and desperate for an alternative, well that would be just fine by bernie. so why would he want to pass the contract back over to the bbc?

    it’s in his interest to frustrate fans in the short-term in order to push his ideal long-term solution.

    btw: did you notice that the other week, during the grid walk, flavio said he’d only stay in f1 if martin did? think mb has alternative plans?

  • ahh, no, i think he’s been a driver manager for a good while now. i’m thinking more about his commentating / journo plans.

    he’s an award-winning journalist – did you see the recent in depth coverage about understeer / oversteer on f1 cars recently? do you really think itv paid for those kind of graphics? someone else had a hand in it for sure 🙂

  • Ok ive just checked on all listings online and with the F1 website.

    The quali is going to start at 18:00 GMT so they will just do what they did with Canada and cut straight to the first knockout. It will be live the only delay will be during the conversion process to digital.. about 1-5 secinds..

    You dont have to get Sky or Cable or anything to get ITV4 just get a freeview box (£20 from any elecy dealer) All you need to do is make sure your ariel can get the digital signal.

  • You dont have to get Sky or Cable or anything to get ITV4 just get a freeview box

    Thanks Mayhem, usful info there.

    I am aware that Freeview boxes have come down in price this year. I’m just annoyed that I have to part with any money in order to watch a sport that should (in my mind) be shown live on a terrestrial channel, as it is most of the time. 😉

  • I should have posted this yesterday but the Quali WAS live on ITV4 we only missed the first 30 seconds of session 1, Not really much of a problem as no-one was out on a hot lap when they got round to going to the track.

    Still good fun to watch though

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