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I am enjoying the SKY race feed and presenters. A bit of fresh air so to speak AND no stinking commercials. I don't see why I'd go with the F1 streaming service especially with all the problems they seem to be having.
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So I did buy the streaming service and agree that it is not good live. The replay works though. It is kind of cool to be able to switch back and forth with the driver cameras and just listen to the local sounds (the FX feed.)
If you DVR the races and then watch, I think the stream service is a better option than "just" the ESPN/sky feed. (And remember they had their fiasco on race 1 with the commercials.)
Here are a couple of posts I made over at RASF1 (
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rec.autos.sport.f1/8Oam2ZadTc4 ) on usenet:
"Well they finally have it on for Spain. I didn't get to see it live, but watching the replay seems pretty good so far.
You have the ability to watch the main program with commentators in English, German, French and Spanish. Or you can just listen to what they label as the FX track. That is basically what sounds the camera is picking up. This is really cool because you can hear the conversations going on in the scene (without the commentators talking over the feed.)
They also have all the drivers listed and you can select them for the onboard. When watching a driver feed you can listen to only the team radio without and background noise (very quiet) or any of the commentary tracks or the FX feed from the onboard mic.
The best part of all this is that it all seems to be contained in the replay so you can go from driver to driver in real time and rewind. That means you could see an incident and then check each of the driver feeds with the FX and radio. I was concerned that this would not be possible in the replay but it seems to work.
There are problems though in that it must be massive mounts of data. I'm at work where we have a pretty robust pipe and still having buffering issues with the feed. I will try it again at home to see if it is a data issue or maybe something with the firewalls here.
All things considered, this is pretty cool. It might even push me over the edge to drop my cable subscription. The only reason I really keep it is the ability to time-slip F1. F1 TV looks to make that unnecessary."
and
"The buffering was an issue but that seems to be a problem only with the on board camera feeds. I've also noticed that this seems to happen in certain areas of the track. Perhaps this is an issue with the video from the car to the data system (by that I mean maybe they don't get a constant video feed around the entire circuit.)
I'm watching the qualifying replay and so far there are no buffering issues at home on my mac. It is exactly the same feed as Sky (which probably shouldn't be a surprise). I have no idea who the other language commentators are but I would guess they are the same one who already provide commentary in their home countries.
I have the audio set to FX so no commentary and just noticed that the team radio pop-ups come through. I can also confirm that if you are on the driver on board, the radio is not censored. (Rewound on his feed and clearly heard Gasly's f-bomb.) It is actually quite enjoyable to just listen to the noise (being what it is...)
From the AT Review (about the value):
"If you have access to ESPN, I'm honestly not sure it is. You get the same video feed of the race with the same commentary team, and my experience of ESPN's stream quality to our Apple TVs has been pretty darn good. And if you still want access to the archived videos, all that stuff is available in the much cheaper F1 TV Access tier."
I only agree if you are watching the races live. That seems to be where all the bugs are. If you time-slip, so far, the replay works well (does glitch for the on-bards in some places) and being able to control the audio is cool.
I'm not sure if you get the same deal with the low-cost version. I think that is just a straight replay without all the additional feeds.
Finally, if you want the time and scoring detail, you can just open another window and run it along side the vides."
FWIW
DLM
