12/02/2015
NEWS STORY
Just last week came the news that Formula One's television audience fell 5.6% to 425m in 2014 due to the increasing number of Pay TV stations broadcasting the sport. However it has now come to light that the picture was not so bleak in the United States where the audience grew 10.1% to 12.6m viewers according to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Christian Sylt.
Interest in F1 in America has been fuelled by the return of the US Grand Prix in 2012 at the purpose-built Circuit of the Americas in Texas. It also received a boost the following year when F1's broadcaster switched to the NBC Sports Network (NBCSN) and its flagship NBC channel. Traction has been growing ever since.
F1's annual media report reveals that last year the number of viewers in the US who watched between four and nine races increased by 128% whilst those who watched ten or more doubled. It adds that "NBCSN recorded year-on-year increases for every single round shown. On average each race shown on NBCSN attracted 85% more viewers this season when compared to 2013. The main NBC channel naturally continued to pull in the biggest audiences for Formula 1 in the USA with the Formula 1 Grand Prix du Canada 2014 ranked as the most watched race this year."
The Canadian Grand Prix alone got 3.5m unique viewers using the industry-standard measurement of anyone who watched at least 15 non-consecutive minutes of the sport.
Since 2012 it has been harder for casual viewers to watch F1 in Britain as Pay TV network Sky Sports broadcasts all of the races live whilst its free-to-air rival the BBC only shows half of them. F1's boss Bernie Ecclestone says that the shared broadcasting "is working all right. We are still getting very good TV coverage. It just means that we are getting more coverage from the pay people now."
As viewers have to pay to watch all of the races in Britain it means that they are more likely to have a higher disposable income and be more committed. There has been a similar trend Stateside as the report states that "viewers watching in the US tend to hail from the ABC1 end of the socio-demographic spectrum and are twice as likely as the general population to be ranked as 'high-earners'."