For years, all Formula One fans have wanted is a live stream of the races, and we’re finally getting it in the United States in 2018. It’s called F1 TV, and it’s how we’ll finally get to stream F1 legally without commercials. Support series will be on the platform as well, and monthly pricing for the live stream is only set to be between $8-12.
The series calls F1 TV its “biggest investment in its digital transformation to date.” Each practice, qualifying and race session, plus press conferences and pre- and post-race interviews will be offered live. All 20 cars’ onboard cameras will be able to be viewed during each race session.
Furthermore, every support race that runs with F1—including Formula 2, GP3 and Porsche Supercup—will be streamed live through the service as well. Best of all, every subscriber will be able to access F1's historical video archives.
The service comes with multiple tiers of service, but the main live subscription version is F1 TV Pro. F1 TV Pro comes with exclusive video feeds that a user can access in to their customizable view. A demo of those views wasn’t embeddable at the time of this writing, but can be viewed on F1's site here.
A less expensive non-live subscription tier called F1 TV Access will also be offered, with live race timing, data and radio commentary, plus extended highlights from each session.
The live F1 TV Pro streaming service will initially be available in two dozen countries to begin with, including the United States, Mexico, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Belgium and much of Latin America—although notably not the United Kingdom just yet. Streams will be available in English, German, Spanish and French. The F1 TV Access tier will be available “near globally” from the launch, however.
Access will initially just be through desktop and web apps, with mobile and TV apps set to launch shortly thereafter for Apple, Android and Amazon. Users will be able to use their account on multiple devices, too.
F1 TV Pro will be priced around $8-12 monthly with annual prices still yet to be announced, but “priced according to market,” per F1's release. Pricing for the lower tier will also be announced at a later date.
The service itself will be handled through Tata Communications, per the announcement, although an earlier, since-deleted tweet also tagged last year’s U.S. broadcaster NBC and NBC’s streaming technology partner iStreamPlanet to the confusion of American fans.
NBC, who ceded the F1 broadcasting rights to ESPN last year, no longer has television or digital rights to the series, per an NBC representative who responded to Jalopnik.
Former NBC pit lane reporter Will Buxton got fans further riled up when he also tweeted “Well this all looks rather good...” about the service. His tweet was also deleted after F1 deleted their initial tweet.
Buxton recently announced that he’ll be back in front of a camera somewhere, but did not respond to our question as to whether it’d be on F1's new service at the time of this writing. We’ll have to keep guessing as to who F1 will be using to commentate on their live stream for now.
[Full disclosure: Jalopnik is owned by Univision, which holds the Spanish-language broadcast rights to F1 in the U.S.]