http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/motorsport/formula_one/9550930.stm

Basically BBC get half the races live, Sky get all of them live.

The BBC article here puts a lot of spin on all this being good deal etc but it means free to view looses half of the F1 for the first time since, well forever?
What are peoples thoughts?

It's a bit of a let down for dedicated racing fans but better than losing it altogether. At least we still seem to get the 'important' races.

Does this means the TV Licence price will come down? No? 

Apart from Top Gear, i rarely bother watching the BBC Channels now, and find myself more on C4, E4, More4, Film4.

I watch Top Gear, F1 on Sunday if I'm about and any interesting documentaries on throughout the week, most of which now appear to be about using fancy graphics to make points instead and dumbed down with analogy after anology to rehash over the same point just in case the people watching the pretty picshures didn't get it the first time.

Also, WTF is with this new trend of spending the first ten minutes of programme run time as some sort of extended introduction discussing what they will cover over the remaining 50 minutes? Scrap that crap and just give us the full hour FFS!

Most modern British TV is infantalised. Documentaries are mainly aimed at the lowest common denominator and drama tends to feel like Dr Who as though it has been written for children.

Very disappointing surely there is more to this than meets the eye? The viewing figures are higher domestically than they expected and  over the last few races it has been pointed out how many other counties use the BBC’s coverage, ...unless they are giving it away surely that must offset the production costs quite a bit? 

 I stopped watching F1 for the most part when it was on ITV apart from Martin Brundle it was shocking, the last few seasons on the BBC have been outstanding and I have even tuned into qualifying on the Saturday because the coverage has been that good.
I would be tempted to get sky sports if you could just get it on its own ...but they force you to get a bunch of channels I would never watch! ...well there is always the internet when its not on the BBC and then nobody gets my viewing figure, I’m not going to feel in the slightest way bad about it tbh! 

http://www.petitionbuzz.com/petitions/keepf1onthebbc

24k on that petition already is quite impressive.

Interesting to see different opinions on different forums. On the PF1 forums they're saying out of 6M UK viewers affected, and potentially 60M users worldwide that will suffer a knock on effect (BBC sell their coverage to other countries...) that 20,000 was pretty poor. Personally I think most people don't tend to bother with online petitions so they're not a great indicator most of the time.

Whats shocking is that its actually our license fee thats helped keep F1 off the free to air channels. C4 and C5 were both interested and claimed they had the finance so the BBC did a deal with Sky to stop it going to them. This way they keep some of the races and prevent non sky customers from tuning into their rival channels. For a public funded business thats pretty bad.

Personally I'm off to order my Sky package. Not because I'm not annoyed or don't care, but purely because F1 is my favourite thing in the world and has been since I was 6. Besides which the missus has agreed to stop hogging my Astraweb if she has Sky with the movie channels so I'm just getting the full package.

It Goes deeper then just F1.
BBC are in the sh*t and it seems daft that they charge more for the TV Licence then ever (And want it to go up!) yet are offering less and less on the TV and loose more and more things to other TV Channels.

I am told that there have been less and less movies on the beeb in the last few years, Overall less sport, Rumours of sky trying to get Wimbledon and Poorer quality shows.

What little money they do have they want to plough into crap dramas. Two spring to mind recently, a faux sci-fi affair with Jamie Bamber where nothing happened and some undersea submarine thing that, despite a sizeable budget for TV, still managed to look and feel like crap.

They also put far too much money into their "flagship" shows like Dr Who, even though it's a relatively poorly written children's program.

It wouldn't cost much to make a British version of The Walking Dead, some people have made Zombie movies on a budget of £100s, and you don't need to be getting stars that people know, they could do something like C4 (Skins, Misfits) where they take the up and coming actors and place them in the show as well as a few "Guest Appearances" from veterans, if done well it would work out but i can't see them having Blood/Swearing etc on the BBC, unless its really late at night.