Drive to Survive season five

Formula One Management looked into dividing the rights to broadcast live races in the USA between multiple streaming platforms before agreeing its exclusive deal with Apple.

The series announced last week it had signed a five-year contract with the technology giant to stream races on its Apple TV platform starting next year.

Formula 1 already has a relationship with another streaming platform, Netflix, which has broadcast the successful fly-on-the-wall documentary Drive to Survive since 2019. The series’ director of media rights and content creation Ian Holmes said they explored the possibility of streaming at least some of their races on Netflix.

The streamer “wanted to explore a few options, but we felt that it wasn’t quite right,” Holmes told Variety.

“A lot of the conversations with quite a lot of the US media steered towards creating packages, which is a lot more common in this market than pretty much anywhere else. We actually looked at splitting into the first half of the season and second half, or we could carve out the sprint races.

“We went into quite a lot of detail. We went through the whole [gamut] and tried to keep an open mind about what’s best for the sport.”

Some of the most popular team-versus-team sports in America have thousands of matches per season and the rights to them are divided between different broadcasters. F1 has just 24 grands prix per season and FOM eventually decided to keep them all in a single package.

“Because we don’t have thousands of hours of content, we broadly thought that if we can have a good contender that wants everything, it might be better,” said Holmes. “There are pros and cons of both approaches, so there were quite complex discussions, different discussions, depending on who it was with.”

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