At the Sky Sports F1 press day we had a presentation from Martin Turner, the executive producer at Sky Sports.
One thing that was reiterated was that a dedicated channel allows for much more time to get into F1 and dive deeper into the stories and teams.
More teams
Being a whole channel and getting the Sky Sports treatment has allowed them to give more access to the lower teams, the top 4 teams are ususally picked when there is limited time to broadcast, the BBC currently have this issue. But, now the viewers get to see all the teams. We saw a clip showing behind the scenes at Caterham, if they can do that kind of work for all the other teams, then every viewer is in for a treat.
More archives
After doing a deal with Beaulieu, Sky Sports have a lot of archive race footage going all the way back to 1950. They already have a lot of races already edited for broadcast.
More highlights
On top of full race re-runs, it was announced that there would be a 90 minute highlights show and also a 30 minute highlight programme set to music, in a similar style to the Football highlights programmes.
More behind-the-scenes
Having the whole channel has allowed Sky Sports to go further in-depth on teams. In an example clip we were shown it had a simplified organisational chart of the Sauber team and then went into detail about each role and who the person was. Definitely a lot more in-depth behind the scenes footage then has been shown before.
More technical
One point that Martin Brundle made was that he was not able to do as many technical videos as he would have liked. Now he gets to do that. For instance he is heading to Italy next week to drive the 2010 works Ferrari with a full crew and a lot of the Ferrari team management. Several films will be shot there and will be shown throughout the start of the new season. When Brundle turned up to a meeting earlier in the year he brought a list of 30+ features he’d like to do, so far he is set to do over 20 of them. It just shows that Sky Sports F1 really is getting the full treatment.
More ways to watch
Although the channel requires a Sky subscription, there are many ways to watch the content provided by the channel. Be it online with clips on the website, watching live using Sky Go or just keeping up to date with the @SkySportsF1 twitter account. (You could also follow @MotorTweets too!).
One point that Martin Turner made was that he thinks the BBC do a great job with the limited time that they have to broadcast.
All in all I think that for any type of F1 fan, be it casual or a technical junkie, the channel will have everything required to show off the sport.
