Formula 1’s pivot to Apple TV in the United States has been one of the biggest shifts in F1’s broadcast landscape in recent times - but is it paying off?
Apple became the exclusive F1 broadcaster in the US this year with a five-year deal, marking a major shift from linear TV to a streaming service in arguably F1’s biggest market.
F1 said Apple was delivering "excellent viewership and engagement" in its mid-season report earlier this year, while Apple vice president Eddy Cue claimed viewership was "up by significant double-digit percentage growth on the race day, and more importantly on Saturdays" versus the previous season on ESPN.
But third parties such as TV analytics firm Samba have claimed household reach since the switch to Apple TV is down, though that doesn’t include hours watched, a metric by which F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali said F1 was up in the US 13% year-on-year in August.
It’s a topic that CEO and president of F1 owner Liberty Media Derek Chang spoke about with Axios Media Correspondent Sara Fischer at 'Formula One's Premium Playbook', an event hosted by The Race and Axios in Austin.
"It was last year here in Austin that we announced the Apple deal. At the time we said, 'look, what we're looking at is something that goes beyond sort of traditional broadcast reach, which is the way we've measured viewership for however many years, or frankly, engagement, which is really the key metric now'," Chang explained.
"What we said a year ago was, what we're looking for is a partner like Apple [that] has a very similar demographic, great overlap there, and then the Apple ecosystem and what we can do with that, whether it's promoting the races on Apple News, Apple TV, in the Apple Store, on your iPhone. I think Apple has a 60% market share in the US.
"Then a lot of the other innovative stuff they can do with the product, which I think their engineers continue to be hard at work on, whether it's being able to follow whatever driver you want, having multiple feeds, all that sort of stuff that will only improve over the next few years. All of that, to me, has been playing out exactly as planned.
"On top of that, the media distribution landscape in the US, and frankly around the world, has been calcifying for years. Now we've got a partner here who is the distribution platform, as well as the broadcaster.
"So what Apple has done in terms of... doing something with Netflix, where Netflix was able to broadcast the Canadian Grand Prix [in the US], or Apple had Season 8 of Drive to Survive, doing a deal with IMAX Theatres, so that people could view our races in theatres.
"They're able to do things that more traditional broadcasters and distribution platforms, because they're so hung up in their contracts and restricted by their contracts, can't do.
"That's an evolving thing that we’ll continue to watch for."
Chang reaffirmed F1’s commitment to Apple that goes well beyond honouring the five-year deal.
"We anticipated having a great partner. They performed exactly the way we thought and frankly even better," Chang said.
"It's common knowledge. It's a five-year deal and we have every intent of having a great partnership with them during that time and hopefully beyond."
Different ways of engaging with F1
For F1, the exact viewership number is only one of the metrics it's chasing. Far more important is how wide an audience it can reach, even if that means fans are engaging in different ways.
"You no longer think about F1 as something that you've got to go to every race or watch every race on television to be a fan, right?" Chang said.
"Now, we would love every person associated with F1 to follow F1 24 hours a day, go to every race or watch every race on TV, but we know that's not going to happen, right?
"But one of the important stats is that we have hundreds of millions of fans out there [and] 60% of those fans engage with F1 on a daily basis.
"Obviously we don't race every day. So this is content that is... whether it's highlights, whether it's previews of upcoming races, whether it's lifestyle things, right?
"Stuff like that that people want to engage with on a daily basis, and that brings them into the sport, makes them feel like they're part of the sport, and it’s front of mind for those people."