F1 TV Premium is a revolutionary product – just not for the reasons you might think.
If you haven’t already heard, F1 TV Premium is a new OTT subscription tier for F1 TV, Formula 1’s first-party streaming platform.
It’s more expensive than the ‘Pro’ tier, which still allows subscribers to watch every live session. However, ‘Premium’ adds the opportunity to create a customised ‘virtual pit wall’ – a flexible layout of live 4K race coverage, driver onboards, data streams, telemetry and radio that knits across up to six separate devices.
If these features sound like a global sports industry innovation to you, they were… five years ago.
In 2020, a group of young, tech-savvy F1 fans released version 1.0 of Race Control: a free-to-download, grey-market, third-party alternative to the F1 TV app that offered all of F1 TV Premium’s features, including the ‘virtual pit wall’. It was only available to paid F1 TV subscribers and did not allow for users to ‘pirate’ the content for free.
Race Control was shut down in 2022 after Formula 1 began protecting its live streams with digital rights management software – this prevented the app from taking the streams. But in its place came Multiviewer, an app that has thus far managed to circumvent Formula 1’s ‘DRM’ and build on Race Control’s legacy as the best F1 TV user experience on the market.
Multiviewer, like Race Control before it, is a free-to-download, grey-market app. It takes live F1 video and data streams without the express permission of the rights-holder and is completely unauthorised by Formula 1.
Thus far, Multiviewer has escaped censure by F1 for three key reasons:
- Multiviewer users must have a legitimate, paid F1 TV subscription in order to use the app — it does not provide content for free, nor does it offer its own subscription options like a pirate IPTV service
- Multiviewer does not allow users to circumvent F1 TV’s terms of service, including the use of VPNs or other methods of illegally accessing content
- Multiviewer’s app has the best user experience on the market for watching live races across multiple streams – better than F1TV and better than any rights-holding broadcaster.
It is difficult to imagine that the features of F1 TV Premium were developed in a vacuum – nor is it difficult to imagine that increasing the price of multi-device viewing was, at least in part, aimed at Multiviewer users.
The six-device limit is now available only to subscribers to F1 TV’s highest-priced subscription tier. Previously, the six-device limit was available to ‘Pro’ subscribers — then the highest tier of the service.
Formula 1 knows that multi-device viewing, above all else, is where they can cash in on the kind of superfans that love Multiviewer. While casual fans are happy to sit back and watch a race, hardcore fans want to closely monitor the battle for 14th on one screen, all while charting the relative performance of Pirelli’s C2 and C3 tyres on another.
It’s not for everyone, but those that love it are happy to pay.
As multi-device viewing is a necessity for many Multiviewer users, shifting the six-device limit into the Premium tier has driven a large number of the app’s users to a higher tier.
Instead of the usual consumer complaints about greed and price-gouging, a tidal wave of Multiviewer users on the app’s Discord server happily discussed upgrading their subscriptions to Premium to continue using the app. More still entered the server to explain that they subscribed to F1 TV specifically to access the Multiviewer app.
This uneasy tango between a rights-holder and a grey-market app is what makes F1 TV Premium a potentially revolutionary product for the sports industry – not its five-year-old feature set.
In short, Formula 1 has found a way to monetise fan-made (or pirate, if you prefer) apps – a unique scenario in global sport.
Pirates that pay
For its part, Multiviewer is incredibly careful not to tread on Formula 1’s toes. It is proactive in keeping itself in F1’s good books and has to be – SportBusiness understands there has been no formal communication between the app’s developer and Formula 1 itself since Multiviewer was created in 2022.
In the release notes for Multiviewer’s original version, the app’s developer says: “The application offers the same (or more) protections for DRM, and doesn’t allow downloading, and requires a paid subscription. We actively forbid discussions of forbidden methods to avoid region locks on the community platforms that we’re active on, so we hope that all of that will show that we’ve acted in good faith, as fans of the sport, and that the app provides actual value to other fans.”
The community that has coalesced around Multiviewer, particularly on the communication platform Discord, are stringent about abiding by F1 TV’s terms of service. The rules are clear – don’t endanger the app’s existence by doing or saying anything that would attract unwanted attention from F1 or its broadcasters around the world.
This also means that the Multiviewer community are far more amenable to price increases than regular customers of F1 TV. Multiviewer users understand that they have no right to use the app, and Multiviewer’s developer understands it has no right to exist.
One Multiviewer user, posited last week that Formula 1 could soon place explicit conditions on how the third-party app could operate, potentially forcing all Multiviewer users to become Premium subscribers to squeeze more revenue from the app.
“Yep, and when they do, we’ll comply, simple as that,” Multiviewer’s anonymous developer replied. “Unfortunately that’s the game. We keep them happy, we stay alive.”
One could argue that F1’s quiet tolerance of Multiviewer is enabled by the format of motorsport itself. Motor racing lends itself well to the multi-screen viewing experience, with action often taking place over multiple square miles rather than the single acre of land required for most sports.
But in that quiet, tolerant relationship between F1 and Multiviewer, there is plenty that rights-holders can learn about how young fans want to watch sport. They want fair pricing and, increasingly, an interactive, customisable viewing experience.
Until the likes of LaLiga can provide these things to its younger fans, the league will be yelling at clouds for some time yet.