Any news on NBC Sports plan for F1 coverage?

Part of the problem is that several drivers -- such as Alonso -- don't use English on their radio comms.
(Even if my ears were better, I'd have little chance with spoken Italian.)

The closed captioning doesn't help, as it can't keep up on race commentary, and it seems to have trouble with technical terms and foreign names.

I had it turned on to translate some of the various accents on British programming, and I was too lazy to turn it off for the late night race. It captioned several of the radio broadcasts as "foreign language" or "unintelligible".

(The funny ones are the captions on the "Firefly" DVD set.
They don't even try to caption the mangled Chinese they sprinkled through the scripts, and TV performers mumble enough that the captions often mark some English lines as "[speaking Chinese]". I feel a little better about not being able to make out some of the lines, if the captioning can't understand them, either. )

 

Overall I was really pleased with the quality of NBCSN coverage. I did notice several screen graphic errors, not only the slow grid order swipes but also things like listing the same driver twice on qualy results graphics (bottas?) A couple times during the race I noticed the bottom screen crawl contained errors. The last error I noticed was on the final race result screen, they misspelled Romain Grosjean's name, I believe "Grojsean". They also showed him driving for Ferrari! Overall I really liked the coverage. The HD image quality was spectacular.

 

I still fast forwarded past the side by side commercials. I can tell they were trying to keep it in a 4:3 format but I have no patience for ppl stuck in the 90s. I miss bv too, he just grew on me.

 

+1 -- with the sound not muted on the commercial, it made me feel like I was in the Robot Chicken seat...

 

Are those graphics from NBC or the F1 feed?

 

I believe they are from the world feed.


Mark

 

Thanks.

 

I'm 99% sure they're from NBC. A few reasons;

- Only the "timing pylon" on the left is in the world feed.
- If you ever watch FP3 online there's no commentary, just the video & timing.
- All broadcasters do their own pre-race (etc) stuff - I don't think Sky's grid listing is the same as NBC's or was shown at the same time for example.
- The local broadcaster also overlays, eg, the names of their talking heads etc.

Cheers,
Ian

 

I also like the fact that if you happened to miss programming your dvr, you aren't doomed to miss the race via re-broadcast. The Australian GP has been re-aired a couple of times already.

 

Or accidentally record 4 hours of the channel guide as one well known member here managed!

Cheers,
Ian

 

That horse is dead Ian.
If needed I'll produce a note from its vet.

 

The pre-race show to me, was the weakest program.
First, If you automatically record the F1 series using a directv DVR you can not include the pre-race in the series, since is scheduled as an unrelated show. So far, It can only be done manually before the race a week at a time.

Second, the complete OnBoard Lap by the top Qualifier was a "no show", as seen @ Speed in previous years ( through the years I have edited and saved these laps to enjoy in the off season).

Third, the absence of a Grid walk by Buxton makes this, in my opinion, a now useless show.
I will wait until the Barcelona race to make a final decision about recording this portion.

 

No grid walk, no Bernie.
Ya win some, ya lose some.

 

well at least now i can use my Directtv iphone app

 

This is the same with Tivo, as well. No option to make it a Season Pass like one can with F1 Extra and F1 36 (and for some reason it shows 2009 as the production date).

 

Odd, Xfinity allows a series setting for the intro show but not the GPs.

 

The side by side is a huge improvement. Other than that...meh.

 

Yeah, I spotted the third Ferrari too. Good idea, there. Domenicalli should have added a third car years ago. We could have used the extra points. But really, GORSJEAN? Why pick him when we could have signed SULIT, or even VANGE DARDE?

Poking fun, of course.

Again, they did a great job for a first outing. We're just talking about growing pains here.

 

Hmmmm..... I dunno about that!.... I reckon "we" could ride this one all season.

"Missing the race" (for "technical" reasons) will forever be known as "pulling a Viz!"

Which one? Doing what?

I haven't checked recently, but can I now watch NBCS (220) live on my iPad?

Cool if so,
Cheers,
Ian

 

For the little bit of practice I watched they fixed the time bar and logos.

 

How come only some of the ad breaks feature the PIP?

Why do they reduce the size of the active screen when they do the split? I watch on a 60 inch screen and the PIP is to small to be of much use.

 

Better than nothing.

 

The sponsor paying for the commercial slot has to agree to run their ads side-by-side. It looked like more of the ads were "Non-Stop" than Melbourne so maybe by China they will all be "Non Stop".

 

My only though was that they used the split for the breaks which the network sold. Those that were given to the local provider weren't split.
But, who knows.

 

That may very well be the case that the "local" ads are run full-screen because they're not handled by the network.