Viewers into overdrive as Seven delays Bathurst
Angry motor racing fans hit out at the Seven Network's coverage of Bathurst 1000 on Twitter yesterday.
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Angry motor racing fans hit out at the Seven Network’s coverage of Bathurst 1000 on Twitter yesterday, after advertising commitments saw the “Live” telecast pushed out by up to 20 minutes.
As Craig Lowndes was crossing the line in his Holden with co-driver Mark Skaife, viewers on Seven were still 10 laps behind the action. The network’s coverage of Bathurst started out live, but the broadcaster paused and restarted the action to suit its ad breaks. Despite the race finishing at 4.53pm, they were still “racing” on television until 5.20pm.
“This 20 min delay in Bathurst telecast is a major fail for ch 7, this is why I don’t watch commercial TV any more,” race fan DDsD tweeted.
“Channel 7 are absolutely atrocious!!! Disgusted, V8Supercars please give the rights to someone who will broadcast Bathurst live, please,” said Riotness–99.
Seven defended the network’s decision.
“The closeness of the race, the reduced number of safety cars in today’s race, advertising commitments and our desire that viewers not miss a single moment of the race led us to time-shift our coverage,” Seven spokesman Simon Francis said.
“Our objective was viewers not miss a moment of action.”
He also addressed criticism that the event was not in HD.l
“(The) decision on HD was made by Seven and V8 Supercars Television based on available equipment and in-car cameras, cameras buried in the track and barriers and the like: a total of 168 cameras (not all cameras were HD),” Mr Francis said.
“Any chance you can sell the TV rights to someone else? Ch7 is pathetic,” BigAlRoss tweeted on the V8 Supercars page.
Source: Daily Telegraph, The Australian
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59 Responses
gary, there are surprised people because Bathurst has a million more viewers than any other V8 race. i.e. once-a-year viewers. Some of these people would be used to the F1 coverage for example (which, except for Bathurst, considerably outrates the V8’s), which is live, amongst other things (imagine the uproar if the AFL GF had been delayed half-an-hour). If something is advertised as being live, then it should be exactly that. This now goes in the bucket along with Today Tonight ads – “what we are telling you about the show actually isn’t true, but we want to get you to watch, so this is what we’re saying in our ads…”.
I watched the race on and off as usual and today I was outraged to find that i was 20 minutes behind real time. Then I thought, big freakin deal !!!
Hope they don’t get the logie for it
Why are people surprised at this. Virtually none of the races shown this year have been “live”. I’ll be looking at the live timing on the V8 site and it may show the race is at lap 50 but go and turn on the tv and they’re only up to lap 40.
And they were bragging throughout the weekend that they had around 160 cameras catching all the action but when Will Davidson hit the wall there wasn’t mutch footage.
If Tony (I know best) Cochrane wants to keep it on FTA then okay, but he should also make it available to be shown live on Pay tv.
They should also remove Skaiffe’s name from the trophy as he didn’t do much, left all the hard work to Lowndes
I’m now really suspicious about the fact they kept saying the race goes for 7 hours. My reaction is no, it only goes for 6.5 hours, maybe even 6, unless you have heaps of rain and/or safety cars – in the end it did run for 6.25 hours – so wondering if all this talk of “racing for 7 hours” was to draw people in for the whole 7 hours… aided by them dragging the coverage out to 6.75 hours (not to mention GP started on One after 6.25 hours of Bathurst).
@Billy Ray Valentine – re your AFL example, you can blame the anti-syphoning laws for that. They can’t show anything on the list on One unless it’s (been) on Ten. If they delay it on Ten, they legally have no choice but to delay it on One as well. This is why it needs to be changed to a new multi-channel paradigm, so that One don’t have their hands tied. I expect they’d show it live in WA if they were allowed to in those circumstances.
This is very embarrassing for the 7 network. Because up until now their V8 coverage was pretty good. This will set a precedent don’t you worry about that. The next time a broadcast rights to anything comes up in the future the competition administrators are going to make it legally binding so that this does not happen again. 7 did mislead the nation and V8 supercars australia (by saying it was live when in parts it was not) no doubt about that. The AFL will take note of this and so wiill the other broadcasters. On a overall issue about 7 Sport’s coverage of certain events it needs improvement can get better but will it that is debatable unless someone forces their hand and gets success by doing things differantly. You have to understand that the reason that 7 doesnt change their formula is because at least financially it works and has been for quite some time, and in this day and age of investors and big fat pay checks to cheif executive officers its not uncommon for the company to put money ahead of everything else, afterall our government does it. Again the only thing that can change a companies strategy in this case when covering sports events is they need to be shown up by someone else who then becomes successful at their own game ie ONE HD.
I know that this is a story on the V8s but look out for the NBL on ONE HD on the 15 of October for all you Basketball fans this will be live no doubt about it.
Scotty – ONE is not live all the time in WA
if for example a saturday night game of AFl was shown on ten and ONE, and ten had it delayed by 30 mins or 1 hour (which was often the case this year), ONE also showed in delayed…
Typical Seven they don’t give a rats tossbag about the viewers this is how they’ve always been. If it’s not live then don’t advertise it as Live idiots! For live sport Seven really are the worst by far. Just look at the debacle that is their AFL coverage.
I’m now also wondering if the delay build up over the 6 hours of racing was deliberate to cut into the F1 on ONE? I mean they couldn’t have paused the race every ad break or are they saying they only have 20 mins of ads over the race or they only paused some parts?
Seriously did they think they would get away with this with people using twitter at the track to report action as it happened.
Maybe they were counting on more safety car laps and a longer race for even more ads? But really how much more advertising do we need, the cars are covers, logos on screen for different camera’s, pop-up ads the list goes on!
And ITA not all the cameras need to be full HD, and I’m sure at least some were HD as really who is making TV cameras that are not?
billy ray valentine um ONE is live in WA
Sorry…..I didnt know bogans could tell the difference between live and delayed….maybe thats what channel 7 was thinking too!
Hahahahahaha
welcome to our world over here in WA where all sport (Except for pay tv) is delayed….
Mr Do-Bee and others, you are still missing the point of the complaints. No-one here is saying that Seven shouldn’t have ads during the coverage.
I have no issue with Seven needing to meet its commercial obligations. But they shouldn’t advertise an event as “live” when it isn’t. That was a lie and ACMA should have something to say about it.
They lied again when they said that the race had less breaks than expected and that they didn’t want viewers to miss any action. There were plenty of occasions when they returned from an ad break and recapped what had occurred while we were away. If you do the maths, you’ll see that at least 30 minutes of the actual race could not have been broadcast.
Seven did it for one reason and that was to ensure that the broadcast of the race didn’t finish before the Japanese Grand Prix started on One.
Here’s a tip people, don’t attack channel 7 they will just ignore you, their only focus is their bottom line. Attack the advertisers! Call, email, send letters to the advertisers shown during the telecast complaining that you will not support their products or business because of your anger at the lies of channel 7. They said it was live…it was not, simple as that!
Tony Cochran from V8 Supercars gave a very poor explanation of channel 7’s behaviour during the season on a recent episode of V8 Extra, I’ll be interested in his “spin” explaining this one!
Added to channel 7’s lies was the atrocious re-transmission by Prime to regional viewers. The synch was out with the sound, and not just a fraction…it was out enough to be very annoying. They constantly flicked between screen aspect ratios and the screen went to black on numerous occasions during the broadcast – no vision and no sound.
if they want to have plenty of ads, ok do that. but they should have went straight back to the live action. it’s the olympics all over again and thankfully they have lost the rights to that now
What a bunch of pathetic imbo’s Seven are. The decision to time shift the telecast would have been made days before and had nothing to do with lack of safety cars or exciting racingo r whatever else they want to claim.. It was done by Seven for Seven and no one else. I couldn’t care less if Seven have commercial breaks during the race, (as long as they are of reasonable lenghts) , but do a simple thing and show it Live. Am pretty sure when Ten had the rights they would take commercial breaks too….but when they came back from them they would say.”while you were away this happened” but it seems that even doing something as simple as that is way too hard for Seven.
Seven treat the viewers as if we are dumb.. When Seven took the rights over from Ten, they ( 7) promised the world ….. BU they have delivered the local rubbis tip. Its not the first sport that Seven have done this too and it sure as heck wont be the last.. Watch out NRL, Seven will time shift you just as they do with the ARU test matches
Oh and thanks to the forums for having a live race thread with results before the LIVE coverage showed it on Seven.
this is typical of seven and their reasoning is it’s usual flimsy self. ok you can have ad breaks. but go back to the live coverage. 7 are a disgrace. if they get the nrl they will do the same thing, like they do with union tests. they do this all the time. go to an ad break and 5 minutes later they go back to where they left off, whill there has been try scored
geez bindi for someone not keen on sport you have alot inform fans of. As for not being pleased, lets all remember the stories and posts with supernatural in the topic if never being pleased is to be metioned
to those who don’t get it – if someone texted you the ending of a whodunnit movie while you were at the world premiere showing of same (thus expecting to be able to try to work it out for yourself before the end with no interruptions), half-an-hour before the end, would you not be upset? This wasn’t advetised as delayed coverage – was supposed to be live.
@John Citizen – good point. 7 did invent race-cam, yet now they lag behind U.S. sport in same.
@peter – spilt petrol is highly flammable! 🙂
It’s typical Seven. All they had to do was come back live after commercial breaks and replay anything significant. Nine do it easily with Friday Night Football to keep it live.
i think there would be even more complaints if is was shown live but cut to bits. viewers seem to want it all but simply can’t have free-to-air, no ads, played in full and live in this situation.
The thing that is wrong here is advertising it as live when they surely had some knowledge that it would happen.
The numbers don’t add up.
It was a 6 hour race. And lets say there’s 15min of ads per hour.
6×15= 90min of ads in total.
But the broadcast finished only 30min late.
So in effect Ch7 did 30min of time-shifting And dropped 60min of ‘real time’ during the race for ad breaks.
Perhaps all the whingers can chip in a few bucks so that Seven don’t have to run so many ads next year. There is no way Seven will cover the event at their own expense. It’s called commercial television. 20 minutes is no big deal. Studies have shown the ability to delay gratification is linked to intelligence.
Three lame excuses.
They didn’t want viewers to miss any minute of action? If something significant actually happened during the commercial, is this not what replay was invented for?
I’d prefer 90% of the telecast in HD rather than nothing. In-car cameras should be HD, they are available. And I don’t think anyone would be bothered if the in-track cameras or any of the other unique-type one’s are not in HD.
They should adopt “In-Race Commercials” such as ESPN and like use here in North America, even if it’s for half of the commercial blocks. A small window which keeps showing the telecast, while a bigger window on the screen shows the advertisement. Best of both worlds?!
Hopefully Ten/One or Fox Sports pick up the rights next time around, only way to guarantee is live, HD & with less commercials.
Another abject failure by commercial television networks to understand their market, and its demographic. The number one thing, i repeat, the number one thing, you Never do to a live broadcast is do a swifty on people loyal to that sport and have a clayton’s live broadcast…and hope no one notices. The irony for these TV types (which they don’t get) is that by delivering a true, live, professional broadcast, they will actually increase their audience over the longer term, with commensurate increases in revenue, whilst also strengthening their brand. Short term goals to ensure a requisite amounts of ads are placed to appease advertisers (and who says they’re happy about this?!?) is the dumbest thing they could have done. Unfortunately there’s a long track record of this happening on commercial TV.