FIA Rally Working Group: the future of WRC and the rally sport

[typhoon]

Bit difficult to sell to TV broadcasters around the world when you give it away for free on the world's biggest internet video service.

It's 2024, TV broadcasters wants to purchase live content and not highlights to be broadcasted at 11pm CET.

[WRCStan]

It's 2024, TV broadcasters wants to purchase live content and not highlights to be broadcasted at 11pm CET.

If you can explain why in the UK a 52 minutes highlights show is on the commercial channel ITV4 a week on Wednesday later, a channel which doesn't show the live stages, while Youtube has 2 minute clips; then I'll change my view.

[typhoon]

If you can explain why in the UK a 52 minutes highlights show is on the commercial channel ITV4 a week on Wednesday later, a channel which doesn't show the live stages, while Youtube has 2 minute clips; then I'll change my view.

This is up to the WRC Promoter adjust the price tag for what it offers to broadcasters. On the other side, Broadcasters weights the budget they can gather from advertisers and take their choices.

Now: if WRC Promoter discounts the highlights, more free to air (FTA) broadcasters would be interested in getting those highlights, since they can return on their investments and offer new contents to their viewers based on their target audience.

RAI (Italian BBC) and private SportItalia respectively ditched WRC and WRX once those rights became too expensive for their budgets. Those two networks had a combined audience of almost 700k viewers and about 4% share. Which for a "minor" sport like WRC would be gold now!

It would be very useful, for next 2025 season, to arrange those contracts in a way they will be able to freely distribute 8-10 minutes videos on official WRC YouTube channel.

Time for the WRC Promoter to take bold decisions eventually.

[Franky]

RAI (Italian BBC) and private SportItalia respectively ditched WRC and WRX once those rights became too expensive for their budgets.

Most likely it wasn't just about getting to expensive but also not producing not enough ratings. TV is all about ratings and advertising money that you can get for those ratings.

[typhoon]

Most likely it wasn't just about getting to expensive but also not producing not enough ratings. TV is all about ratings and advertising money that you can get for those ratings.

Both were above their daily average ratings on the same timeslots.
RAI, for example, during Rally Sardinia got 200k more viewers (in a channel that gets about 400k on average) on all stages broadcasted, Sunday's Powerstage included (competing with Serie A's football match for the Asian markets at 12.30 CET!!).

It's all about price, not ratings for sure. At least in Italy, elsewhere I don't know.

But again, if you got cheaper rights that can cope with those ratings, you're good to go and you get a profit for it. It's not rocket science.