Wrc+

[sonnybobiche]

Thoughts on Rally Sardinia coverage:

1. Abi Stephens is the one to keep as main presenter. I was really big on Kiri Bloore, because she was just so much more capable than almost everyone else, especially in those first days in Monte. In fact Abi probably had a much easier job than she would otherwise have had because Kiri had sort of whipped all the complacent WRC regulars into shape, showing them what it takes to run a proper motorsports broadcast.

But for whatever reason Stephens doesn't get tripped up by the producer talking in her ear like Kiri did. And there's a sense of ease there that was maybe a little lacking in Kiri. Kiri would regularly just cut people off and move on to the next thing, as if she was worried that the viewers were growing bored. (To be fair, it was usually with Julian when he would start rambling, almost asking to be cut off.) Abi is more effortless. She's happy to let the conversation go where it will, but it never seems to go off the rails.

On the other hand, Kiri seems to understand better than anyone else how important it is to keep the fans actually interested. It's more important than your stupid engineering debrief. More important than your team being able to sit in front of their laptops undisturbed. When Kiri entered the Toyota control room uninvited to show how the team work behind the scenes, it was actually exciting. It was voyeuristic.

WRC needs a person like Kiri pushing the coverage in that direction, because if you leave it to the rest of them, they will quickly go back to doing bland, dishonest PR for the teams and promoter. You can see it every time Becs, Colin, or Julian interview someone alone. They start feeding the person PR answers with a question mark at the end of the sentence. "Elfyn, of course not the start you wanted to the rally, but there's still a long way to go and hopefully you'll be able to make up some places?" "Craig, how happy are you to be back in the car? Are you looking forward to the stages?"

2. Surprisingly, WRC now actually has too many capable presenters. Or maybe not too many, but there are too many people playing too many different parts. People swap in and out of particular roles way too much. Heck, in the studio segment after the rally, we had Emyr Penlan take over the lead presenter role from Abi without explanation! (By the way, Penlan is surprisingly decent at it.) We have to have some stability. Paul King should ALWAYS be the voice of the highlights. Julian should ALWAYS be the co-host. Becs should ALWAYS be the play-by-play commentator on the live stage coverage, and Desborough should always be the color man, except when they bring in a special guest commentator like Gus Greensmith. Molly Pettit and Colin Clark should ALWAYS be doing the stage end and service park interviews. It's confusing and frustrating when people keep switching around seemingly at random.

3. OK, here's the big one: on screen graphics. They are really, really, poor. They look ugly and they are more confusing than informative. My absolute biggest complaint is that despite watching every stage live, I feel like I have less of a sense of the situation at any given moment than I do when watching the highlights. This is primarily because the left-hand timing screen is so, so useless. What is the point of constantly displaying the total competitive stage time of the lead driver? That is information that literally nobody cares about, not even the lead driver. We care about the intervals between drivers at any given moment. These get displayed for a few seconds after a driver finishes a stage, and then, incomprehensibly, they are hidden again. SHOW THE INTERVAL. ALWAYS.
Also, there is no reason to ever list the road order while a stage is running. They already highlight the 3-letter driver name as he starts the stage. That tells us all we need to know. What we need is a table showing everyone's place in the rally and interval between them. And when a driver comes to the end of a stage and it turns out he's lost or gained a position, you make a beeping sound and show the driver's name moving up or down the order, just like in MotoGP.

4. Overall, the video quality needs to seriously improve. Bandwidth is not expensive, guys. Heavily compressed 720p 25fps with more artifacts than detail just doesn't cut it these days. It looks fine on my TV from 10 feet away, but on my 4k monitor at my desk, it is nearly unwatchable in fullscreen.

5. All Live does not work at all in Chrome. I have to use Microsoft Edge on my PC. That sucks. Also, it does not work on my Amazon FireTV, except for true 'live' playback, i.e., there is no way to click on segments and watch them after they air, like you can on the computer. In fact the FireTV app is generally pretty broken. And speaking of clicking on segments and watching them after they air, that Electronic Programming Guide interface sucks ass. If you're watching the rally on your own schedule, maybe an hour or even a day behind the true live schedule, you have to use the EPG. But the start and end times of each segment in the EPG have little correlation to the true start and end times of segments in the broadcast. The "Studio" segment abruptly stops, and then you click the next segment, e.g. "Stage 10", and you get the remaining 5 minutes of studio segment before the actual stage starts.
Also, the EPG start/end times are not exactly contiguous, so a handful of seconds of the broadcast is just gone forever between the end of one segment and the start of the next. Most annoyingly, it doesn't automatically start playing the next segment. You have to manually click it, and it's impossible to tell what segment is currently playing and what segment you have to play next. You have to remember which segment you just watched and what it was called on the EPG, which is surprisingly hard to do.

6. The really should show classic rallies during the 1hr+ breaks. The one time they did it (during Argentina), it was great. But maybe that was a freebie from Motorsport.com, who now own the entire Duke Archive. Regardless, you can't just have supercut footage and two bars of music on loop for an hour.


That may seem like a whole lot of complaints and not much praise, but actually I think All Live is a good product. They just need to iron out a few minor wrinkles and it will be great.

Your thoughts? I'm especially interested to hear who people like more as lead presenter and why.