I saw this part and thought there was an off-chance that was accounted for, such that these rounds will not be scheduled on Fridays.
But they will be happy with even less FTA. Not me saying that.
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I still think the better way to do it is one race most weekends (saturday?) on Seven, so it stays in the consciousness of ordinary people throughout the year. Supercars has a hard enough time keeping its head above water with three, four, even five week gaps between events.
But I guess that involves having a FTA partner that’s willing to pay more than $10m a year. Even 12 years ago when it was a much more relevant sport, they were really struggling to put together a free tv deal.
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Yep, no regular coverage = no viewers.
Even a consistent highlights package would help. I’m not sure what they have in Aussie, but here in NZ, FTA highlights get buried on Monday/Tuesday afternoons on SkyOpen. Great for the unemployed, but probably not for the companies who get their brands stuck to all the cars and catchfences.
In Australia, highlights of the Foxtel exclusive races are shown on Seven on late night on Saturdays and Sundays.
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I reckon you could do something similar to how some overseas rights work, and have some races that start live on FTA, but then are padded with complete ad breaks that pause the race and fall out of sync with live by the end.
Given how Supercars isn’t doing all that well, you could probably avoid spoilers of the winner for the lesser races - it’s really only Bathurst which has mainstream attention at this point, Foxtel would still have a solid offering of “exclusively live”, but they would have racing on the TV more often, and I think that’s what it needs.
FTA rounds force the races to go time certain as well to make sure Seven can exit on time for other programming (only Bathurst doesn’t have a time certain period)