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Carsales Staff11 Feb 2015
NEWS

MOTORSPORT: Horror start for V8s on pay-TV

V8 Supercar new era of TV telecasts began on Sunday with an average of only 30,000 viewers around Australia...

COMMENT
Live V8 Supercar action on pay-television made an abysmal debut last weekend.

The V8 Supercar SuperTest at Sydney Motorsport Park on Sunday drew a national audience of only 30,000 viewers on pay-TV service Fox Sports.

Fox is now the primary telecaster of V8 Supercars under a six-year, $241 million deal in which free-to-air network Ten is to simulcast only six rounds of the major national championship live and show delayed packaged highlights of the others.

The 30,000 viewers for the SuperTest on Fox (and said to have been 19,000 in the five major Australian capital cities) left it well outside the top 20 programs on pay-TV on Sunday.

Ten screened an hour’s highlights of the SuperTest, drawing an average of 97,000 in the five capital cities combined – and not making the day’s top 100 programs on free-to-air TV.

An average of another 25,000 viewers watched the Ten highlights in regional Australia.

V8 Supercars marketing director John Casey said “the overall numbers were pretty much where we expected them – 30,000 on Fox Sports and 144,000 nationally on Ten”.

Casey’s 144,000 is higher than the numbers this author saw for Ten and mentioned above, totaling 122,000 – 97,000 plus 25,000.

Casey said the Ten highlights program had been scheduled quite late and therefore did not get the promotion it otherwise would have.

Fox Sports spokesman Mick Earsman said that “for a Test broadcast and considering the duration of the broadcast [seven hours, 9am-4pm], the average audience of 30,000” was a solid result.

The Bathurst 12-Hour GT and production car race the same day averaged 238,000 on free-to-air Seven in the five capitals, with a regional audience of another 158,000 – a total of 396,000.

While far bigger than Fox’s live audience for the Sydney Motorsport Park test, the 12-Hour number was only a fraction of that of the 1000km V8 Supercar race each October.

Some within the V8 fraternity are claiming Seven’s 12-Hour audience was down on that of SBS for the February Bathurst enduro last year, although SBS screened only the final three hours in 2014 while Seven telecast the whole event this time – the bulk of it on 7mate.

Seven, which was the V8 Supercar Championship telecaster the past eight years but was dislodged by the Fox/Ten deal, claimed an average of 180,000 viewers nationally for the 12-Hour on 7mate – 98,000 in the five capitals and 82,000 regionally.

While the average number of viewers in the five capital cities is the normal measure of TV audiences, Seven claimed a national peak of 730,000 for the 12-Hour on its primary channel and 368,000 in the five capitals, with a national peak of 490,000 on 7mate and 229,000 in the five capitals.

News Corporation’s major newspapers previewed and covered the V8 Supercar test extensively while largely ignoring the Bathurst 12-Hour, won by a NISMO Nissan GT-R driven by three internationals.

A News Corp report on Monday said the V8 Supercar test – free for fans and extended to both days of the weekend this year, denying full-time V8 Supercar drivers the chance to compete in the 12-Hour – had attracted a crowd of 27, 223.

Yet News Corp-controlled Fox Sports drew less than 3000 more viewers nationally for its live telecast of the test, in which a new Ford Falcon FG X driven by reigning Bathurst 1000 champion Chaz Mostert was fastest.

This was the test that V8 Supercars chief executive James Warburton said when announcing this year’s calendar five months ago was going to be “a grand season opening launch, the style of which has never been seen in our sport”.

Then it was slotted a week earlier than normal, on the weekends between the Asian Cup soccer final and the start of the cricket World Cup, supposedly to avoid a clash with the latter -- as though it was going to be some challenger for a mass audience on Fox.

On the Seven numbers, its 396,000 average was more than 12 times the claimed three-day attendance, mainly people paying, attendance of almost 32,300 at Bathurst’s Mt Panorama.

Fox Sports’ 30,000 was barely two-thirds the day’s No 20 program on pay-TV on Sunday – The Big Bang Theory on the Comedy Channel with 44,000.

Motorsport fans have been angry at having to pay to be sure of seeing all V8 Supercar action live now, whereas they have enjoyed races free until now.

Fox is extending live coverage to all practice and qualifying sessions as well.

The V8 Supercar Championship begins with Adelaide’s Clipsal 500 from February 26 to March 1.

V8 Supercar marketing director Casey claimed that “the key point [in the TV scenario] is that the sport [of V8 Supercars] is in excellent shape - average ratings up 12 per cent in 2014 versus 2013, which in the context of live sport in Australia is particularly good”.

That increase may well have been true, and certainly V8 Supercar TV audiences have bounced back from the lows of several years ago, but that number (12 per cent increase) is now history and the landscape has changed.

V8 Supercars are now overwhelmingly a pay-TV sport, certainly in terms of seeing races live -- unless you’re at the tracks.

The evidence from the much-trumpeted test day cannot be seen as positive, no matter how much spin is put on it.

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