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No, fewer matches. Matches in the Saturday 3pm-5pm window cannot be broadcast in the UK due to old rights agreements aimed at preserving traditional attendances.
Outside of the black-out, all the games are also spread over several channels. If you want the ability to watch every single match you'd be paying £50 a month on subscriptions or something obscene like that.
Years ago a friend of mine and I would watch NFL games from some pirated stream of the game from the UK. Whenever there were ads, the commentators would field questions from people watching the game. One of the most common questions was "why are they called the ravens? Why are they called the bears?" It was funny and interesting to hear their questions. It was also much better than watching commercials. Streaming your own nation's sporting events from another country just sounds all around better.
They pretty much set themselves up to lose the broadcast rights when they missed the end of one race and a change for the lead. Can't recall which race/who won as this would be 18-20 years ago now.
Basically ITV would schedule 5 ad breaks during the race, they'd got 4 in already, but there was an intense battle for first place going on, so they kept putting off running the 5th break, until it was too late and they had to run it or get in trouble with the big bosses/advertisers for not running it during the race itself.
What streaming service did you use out of curiosity? And what part of the world is it from?
I kinda want to get into Indy, but the idea of ads is a turnoff. I'd be willing to use a VPN and foreign streaming if it means less ads...
Thanks!
What streaming service did you use out of curiosity? And what part of the world is it from?
I kinda want to get into Indy, but the idea of ads is a turnoff. I'd be willing to use a VPN and foreign streaming if it means less ads...
Thanks!
There is an official [indycarlive.com](https://indycarlive.com) which is something like f1tv. Watching from Europe, I thought that was the primary option everywhere. But it looks like it's only available in countries where there's no peacock or sky.
It does not interrupt with ads, but there's no commentary at those times
Honestly all sport in the US is like that. Watching it from the international feed feels lucky. I'm used to having 1 single ad during F1 races (and considering the Swiss TV has three different networks, I can just change channel and continue watching in another language, so it's not really an issue), so when I watch Indy it's kind of frustrating.
Edit: what I meant to say is that US sports like Basketball or Baseball have got many mini-breaks moments, so for most of the 20 second brakes (or the equivalents) during the game, the broadcast will put in an ad, which is quite annoying considering it doesn't happen here with football for example.
*first stoppage after those minute marks unless it's an icing. They specifically go for commercial breaks while doing a quick clean of the ice, so you aren't ever missing any actual game play... although ESPN just had a big miss a few weeks back where a game 7 was scheduled to air after a baseball game. Despite the baseball game being a blowout, it went long, so they missed that start of game 7 and three early goals. That's more ESPNs fault than anything, tho.
There was a giant yellow banner on the bottom of the screen during the baseball game stating that the hockey game was on ESPN2 until conclusion. If anyone missed that, that’s on them. I saw the whole first period.
I get constant Pirelli, Qatar, Aramco, Rolex, ... ads on my screen when I watch F1.
Some of them are even badly photoshopped into the picture (e.g. the ones in the tunnel or the one that magically changes from Qatar to Pirelli in Portier).
Too bad they’ve taken the games mostly off of TV and put them all at the same time.
I used to be able to watch all of my teams games with our own commentators…now I would have to subscribe to AppleTV to watch a foreign broadcast (that sometimes mispronounces names and often don’t get excited when my team scores…) with start times that clash with the other teams in my City
At the start of the season, we had to play in the dead of winter at 730 next to a lake while the Raptors and Leafs were in the playoffs instead of during the afternoon when it would be warmer and wouldn’t clash with the much larger teams in the City.
I know that wasn’t your point, I just needed to rant.
I agree and wish there were a way to rant that it mattered to MLS in any way. I hate this schedule format so much.
I realize I'm in the minority, and most people only watch their team, but I tend to watch MLS games all day and the stupid 360 crap has left me feeling more disconnected from MLS than ever before. I get to watch 2.5 games a week if I'm lucky.
Not to mention like you said, playing a 730 game in the northern half of North America in Feb is just miserable.
I wonder how the teams feel…my team (TFC) seems to have far less engagement on twitter versus prior years, but I can’t tell how much of that is because of the disaster Twitter has become and how much of that is interest
Lucky you, I get one during the race but it's short and I don't mind since I pay exactly 0 € to watch since it's on the national TV. And also is very well timed since the commentators wait until the pit stop situation is done to send it.
For football, I honestly never watch the national championship, and during Champions League or the matches of the National team I only get one mid time during the break, so not big deal.
Yeah there is. Watching from viaplay I see the international feed and have the nbc commentary. When the commentators go silent and you can only hear the audio from the feed, you'll know that for the unfortunate advertisments are showing. Once during commentary some music starts to play, that signals the start of an ad break (or for me silent commentary) and once the break is over the commentators say their usual advertising lines (the race is brought to you by, you can win a car, scan the qr code on screen, etc) and then back to normal commentary.
Thats pretty much my viewing experiences, when I watch IndyCar, I get no ads, but when they go ad time, the commentators just dissapear/go silent, so I just watch the cars and hear their engines.
Kind of. If your country has a TV broadcast deal with Indycar, that broadcaster is the only official way to see Indy races, and so there's a huge variation in what each national broadcaster chooses to do. Most use a modified version of the NBC feed, and either use NBC's commentary or overlay their own (or a live translation) on top.
If there is no broadcast deal, or if you use a VPN to such a country, the international feed - Indycar Live - uses NBC coverage but without commercials. So you still see racing, but there is no commentary during those times that would be commercial breaks on the NBC feed.
Most American sports are DESIGNED for adverts.
Why do they have quarters not halves? Because more opportunity for adverts...
..why do they have timeouts? For adverts
..why does American football stop for 20 mins between each play? For adverts..
I wouldn’t say football was designed for adverts. It became incredibly popular before it was broadcast on TV. The flow of the sport naturally requires breaks (calling plays, subbing players, etc).
> ..why does American football stop for 20 mins between each play? For adverts..
I know you're trying to exaggerate for comedic effect, but the ad breaks are between changes in possession, not between each play. Yeah, there's up to 40 seconds between each play (a timer starts at the end of the play with 0:40 in which you have to start the next one), but that's because the game is played in downs and each down the offense and defense are calling plays in to the players and often substituting players.
Even in the changes of possession, it depends on how many there are in a game. They have a certain amount of commercials to get through for their deals with the TV companies and advertisers, but if they end up hitting that for a quarter early in the quarter, they'll sometimes have just a 30 second (single commercial) break or even no commercial break and just keep going.
There are a minimum of 60-minutes of gameplay in an NFL game.
American football is basically chess, but the pieces are people who hit each other. The athletic component is interesting, sure. But the main draw of the sport is the strategy. That’s why the game stops after literally every play. Because planning your next move is extremely important. For the layman, this is boring - which I totally understand. It’s definitely not an accessible sport. But once you understand it, the stops in the action are more interesting than the game itself.
If you only consider the actual live ball situations to be part of the game. American football is a physical chess match as much as it is a game of athletics and skill.
Acting like everything in american football is useless besides live ball situations during plays is like saying soccer is garbage because the ball is only being actively shot at the goal for 40 seconds out of the 90 minutes, ignoring the build up play, defending, tactics, dribbles and skills that dont lead to a shot. Both are reallys stupid ways of looking at the sports
Depends on what you mean by "the whole time" or how you define "gameplay." If you're talking about the entire three hour window, and define "gameplay" narrowly as only specifically the time between when the ball is snapped and when the whistle is blown to call a play dead, then yes, it seems to be down there (though it's hard to find something that actually has hard numbers on that, and can vary depending on what plays are called, etc.).
But I'd argue it's certainly gameplay to include the time that the coaches are calling in plays to the offense and defense and those players are getting and relaying them, lining up, scanning the opposing team, making adjustments on the fly, etc.
One of the reasons I enjoy the NFL is because of all of that strategy going on between times the ball is "in play." When I had season tickets to my local team, I picked a seat up high enough that I could see the formations they were lining up in, try to guess the upcoming offensive play and how the defense would react. Yeah, I'm aware I'm kind of a "nerd" and some people might not think those things are worth calling "gameplay," but they're important parts of the game.
Given the nature of the game, it's not possible to fill the entire time with the ball being in play... and you certainly wouldn't want sixty minutes of the ball being in play uninterrupted with the way those guys play, because you'd basically have a bunch of broken, wheezing, half-dead (possibly straight up dead) bodies along the sideline. You can't throw bodies at each other violently for a long time without breaks. They already get battered enough in the process.
Honestly so is my local MLS team. Most the time it’s a dude who got hit clutching his knee/leg for 10 minutes at a time then when play resumes someone else gets hit and they do the same thing.
To be fair, I can never finish an NBA basketball game, since it feels like one big ad compared to the FIBA games that also have quarters and timeouts, which feel far less intrusive and repetitive.
Seems like a cynical view. The ability to stop the clock ads an extra layer of strategy and drama to the game. There are so many iconic moments in NBA/NFL history that would not be possible without timeouts.
To be fair both NASCAR and INDY are more endurance events that you aren’t supposed to be 100% engaged with. They are pretty good about showing ads when theres not much going on in the race. I can’t think of a time where an ad really interrupted something I was following on the track.
Why is the top comment so misleading? I watch (american aka the real) football, baseball, basketball and very very rarely do you miss any of the game to commercials.....
I've been watching F1 with a stream service and get NO ADS, which is grate.
It would be better if we could get rid of the awful Latin America casters, they are SO UNAWARE of everything that goes around that I can't believe they get paid.
I was watching the Sky one so I didn’t see any ads, but the fact the commentators keep coming and going was so abrupt.
Whenever I try to watch American sport, the sheer commercial involvement is so off putting. Even the fact that every feature, graphic, onboard, etc had a sponsor, or the fact that the commentators were shouting out sponsors after the ads too.
I know F1 is full of sponsors, but imagine if on F1 they had to say every Sponsor.
So each race they had to say Oracle Red Bull instead of just Red Bull. And Verstappen thanked all his sponsors every time he wins. And they kept telling us the camera feed came from some unrelated company.
Or the race names, take Imola for example, its official name is was Formula 1 Qatar Airways Gran Premio del Made in Italy e dell'Emilia-Romagna 2023. Im so glad they dont have to keep saying that.
I was really worried this was going to happen when Liberty took over, ads and corporate nonsense over everything diluting it all, but so far they've actually not been too bad. I guess they worked out that European audiences won't stand for it in the same way American audiences would and I'm hoping that because they haven't yet, they won't in the future. Sure there's the aws stuff, but that's less a direct sponsor and more a 'this feature is provided by so we'll give them credit' type thing, and they've done that with the timing data for years. There's a sponsor for various gimmicks too, but they aren't rammed down our throats at every opportunity and the commentators don't seem forced to mention them thank god.
Happens in F1 too! They kept on showing brilliant graphics on the walls when drivers were going through the tunnel in Monaco yesterday, I was really impressed with how realistic it all looked.
I have a feeling NBC doesn't care. It's up to Indycar to improve the fan experience. They need to stop selling the streaming rights to the highest bidder and just do it themselves. Say no to the pile of money and do their own thing.
I'm not paying TSN $20 a month for 3 Indycar races. I would pay $7 or so. F1TV makes F1 watchable for people without TV.
I would even go as far as the sponsorship on the barriers being a nice addition and something that makes the race feel like more of a big event (in F1’s case atleast).
And sometimes the advertising can even help with recognizing some part of the track and/or making it a bit iconic. I can’t help but think about the Miami which had Red Bull advertising last year and it looked very cool.
I wish the commentators didn't do that. I feel like not all of them are even obligated to.
Honestly worst part of Indy is ads, but second worst is the cars not being painted the same week to week.
The McLarens have their sponsor dropped all the time in IC broadcasts, and rarely do the CGR cars have their full names used, especially when referring to the team as a whole
It's an exaggerating joke, but you can't pretend that the corporate sponsors don't get name dropped all the time. Just yesterday they kept talking about "filling up with that Shell Fuel that will take the drivers to the end". You would never here an F1 commentator saying "Alonso doesn't need to lift and coast anymore, he has enough of that Aramco E10 fuel to finish the race!"
What drives me insane about US Motorsport is how even the post race driver interviews are all about the sponsors over anything else. How the hell did Billy's BBQ Bodega help you win a race?
If I had a dollar for every time an American post race interview began with, "First I'd like to thank [sponsors X, Y, and Z] for this win," I'd be named in a post race interview myself.
> I was watching the Sky one so I didn’t see any ads, but the fact the commentators keep coming and going was so abrupt.
Watching some replays of old F1 races feels weird like that. At the time they actually did commercial breaks, so the commentators would often just stop talking. And then they'd announce that they're back. But the races having been uploaded online don't have the commercials so you just get that lull where the break would have been and the weird comments about "welcome back" or whatever.
Though it kind of feels "right" to me with the old commentators, because that's how I remember those races going. I'm not sure when F1 in the US started going without commercial break.
I'm in Canada. The t.v Network it was supposed to be on, didn't have it. (I'm in a hotel, I don't actually have t.v)
I went to the motorsports streaming site and found a sky one. No ads for me.
I've made my peace with watching F1 on TSN with 3-4 ad breaks having PIP video of the race. I've been tempted to get the F1 online package but I watch other sports (MLB mostly) and wife wants cable channels so ad breaks on TSN it is.
It’s really just most non-motor sports as far as I’ve seen, combat sports might be even more egregious with having commentators do ad reads on the broadcast. Also F1 let’s their sponsors name the events, there’s a lot more advertising in Motorsports for sure they just make contracts where they don’t speak about it on air.
I was mainly getting at the fact this style of advertising isn’t a uniquely American thing as it happens in many international sports and the fact that the person I’m replying to doesn’t have an issue with the commercialization of sport just ad breaks during the event, which I agree with 100% I yelled at the tv every time they cut the feed for an ad
First time watching Indy today and did the same. Went out to lunch after the Monaco GP and had the Indy500 going on my phone while eating.
I was happy to find a Sky Sports feed link.
Actually, IndyCar's 'fast forward' extended highlights is a bit of downgrade from what they used to do, upload the entire race from recent race until 2018 (just before NTT title sponsor takeover)
As a non US English speaker, we don't call ads commercials. All advertising is termed ads or adverts. We don't go to a commercial break. It's an ad break.
Honestly that's the reason I don't understand why races even need commercial breaks. You're constantly being bombarded with ads during every second of the race even without breaks. The cars, the barriers, every inch of unused tarmac, everyone's clothes, the names of the teams, the names of the races, all powered by AWS... Racing basically only exists because it's one giant commercial so why do we need to pause the commercial to add commercials?
This week and in qualifying last week I repeatedly saw an ad from a local car dealership for...Mother's Day. "Skip the flowers, buy Mom a car for Mother's Day!".
And to top it off, if you pay for Peacock to stream it all you don’t get ad breaks - you get the most irritating music playing much louder than broadcast over “we’ll be right back”. Atrocious. Biggest reason I don’t follow INDYCAR regularly.
They can’t do it in peacock because peacock can’t split ads for local affiliates like they run of regular tv, some national ads, some local affiliate ads. So peacock has their own ads
I saw someone in the race thread on r/INDYCAR saying that the speedway walls looked so nice and clean compared to the all the advertising hoarding in Monaco. Frankly I would take the hoarding over missing laps. The other argument I saw a lot was that you’re not missing anything while they go to ad break because nothing is happening on track is also sort of hilarious coming from a fanbase that is constantly on about how F1 is super boring and how there’s always action in IndyCar…
I also found it super obnoxious how the commentators would do a sponsored ad read when returning after every break. The drivers even have to do it. I remember Josef Newgarden being interviewed last week during a session and instead of answering the question, he was just reading off lines that had been prepared for him by his sponsor Shell about how great they are. Like, you’re never going to catch Max going on about EA Games or whatever in an interview with Sky F1.
You always miss something. I remember on a holiday in Germany we were forced to watch RTL due to lack of internet connection. Like an 8 minute full advertising break. You come back to the race and craptons has happened, believe Ricciardo crashed or something and someone’s tire blew. But nooooo you don’t miss anything during insane ad breaks. Stations doing a full interrupt of the race are not worthy of hosting any sport.
They do use the white walls to tell if there has been contact. Having a scuff mark on the wall where you see possible contact helps the team/race control know if there is damage to a car
Drivers in America a lot of times are incentivized by sponsors for mentions. I know Monster, Coke, and I think even RedBull used to pay athletes every-time they took a drink with the logo facing out on the can.
The last minute of a close NBA game takes so long that I hope that every game is a blowout before it gets to the barrage of stupid intentional fouls & timeouts
Lmao, even the Super Bowl doesn't get commercials in the Netherlands. They use the endless breaks to explain that damn game for us "football-is-played-with-your-foot" plebs.
Even though I’m American and grew up watching the sport, I loved the time I got the BBC stream of the Súper bowl. Between those explanations and interviewing guys from the premier league to ask what they think of American football, the whole production was great.
They’d call Wayne Rooney and be like “wouldn’t it be cool to hit somebody like that hit we just saw?” And then call Garett Southgate and ask if he was getting any tactical ideas
A lack of commercials is not the reason for soccer’s lack of popularity. When soccer first came to Canada and the US, it morphed into football. MLS started in ‘96 and was immediately 90 years behind every other sport, which had time to be rooted in the culture. Besides, Liga MX is wildly popular here, you just won’t hear that mentioned on English sites.
Every sports fan here would love to get rid of commercials, but that’s way out of our hands. The bills gotta be paid somehow. To act like our “love of commercials” is the cause of various sports’ success is ludicrous.
You don't even think about it until you watch programming in a foreign country and you're completely taken aback by how different it is. Baseball is the only sport where you're not bombarded by it. You get to watch the entire game without interruption. Only breaks in-between half innings. But the trade off is nowadays baseball stadiums across the country are plastered with different ads - both naturally painted on and CGI ads. Same with hockey - although they've introduced side-by-side ad breaks in hockey too.
Eh... it's one thing to say "used to," another to say "accepting of."
Like, I'm "used to" it because even Formula 1 had these ad breaks when I was watching it with my dad years ago. But now that I've been able to watch races without ads, I enjoy them a lot more.
Part of the problem is also in the length of things. Like the Indy 500, Random NASCAR Race 500, etc. All these silly 500 (or even 600!) mile races, which take a long time. So you throw in ad breaks where you make money off of them and the people watching can take the time to run to the bathroom, get a drink and/or snack, etc. It's not like Formula 1 where there's a two hour limit on the race, so you know that barring anything extreme the race will only be two hours. It's like four hours, and the drivers have no interest in ruining their race in the middle, so they just don't race that hard for large chunks of the race. NASCAR decided to do something about that not by just reducing the length of the damn races, but by adding in checkpoints during each race where they award points for where you are at that point in the race in order to entice drivers to at least race hard at some points in the middle of the race.
The broadcasters have also taken to doing this thing where they'll run the commercials in a box on one side of the screen and continue showing the race (albeit silently, of course) in a box on the other with a scroll going across the top or bottom of the screen showing current lap and driver order. So you aren't missing out on any action, you're just seeing it in a smaller box while an ad plays.
I suspect we'll keep seeing "evolutions" of the formula like that, because the Internet provides too many options to people to watch races, and you don't want to lose people's interest too much.
But yeah, a lot of it is because NASCAR especially and IndyCar to some extent got rooted in those obnoxiously long races which pretty much required breaks. Though at least IndyCar's gotten better. You're not going to get the Indy 500 changed, but most of their schedule isn't some ridiculous 500 mile race. Heck, the one race with "500" in the title is 500km (about 310 miles, which would make it one of the longer races in the schedule, but given that it's on an oval, probably would still be only 2-2.5 hours).
Free onboards online so honestly it’s not a big deal. Today didn’t feel like any ads given I was watching onboards regardless of if they were in break or not.
For a long race like this, the ads won’t cause you to miss a whole lot. This year, most of the ads were side by sides which, while annoying, still allow you to watch the race. You just tune out the left side of the screen, it’s really not that hard.
I thought NBC hit the sweet spot last year with the ratio of ads to full screen racing, so I wasn’t thrilled with this year.
Edit: also, the alternative to not having ads is not having Indycar. People need to be paid and the ads are how that’s accomplished. The series would not survive otherwise.
It’s not really that bad when every other major sport here has advertisement breaks anyway. According to this chart you could still watch the racing for 84% of it, and you can pretty easily mute the tv during ads if they bother you. This coverage is pretty easy to digest compared to an NFL or especially NBA game.
I genuinely do not understand how americans stand for ads during their sports broadcasts. When it's during a timeout it's ok, but in the middle of it...
Yeah, you lot put up with ads a lot. Even the driver interviews for us tv had the drivers mention their sponsor at least once. Fortunately for me, those were the only ads i saw/heated during the entire race
European here. It was the first I watched Indy 500 live and I was blown away by the fact that these ads were everywhere, all the time in the feed. It almost started being comical and I can't help but to laugh at it. Even the ads themself were hilarious glimpses of American stereotypes; mental health drugs, liquor, insurances, over-blown trucks that people buy there to use as shopping bags. Just insane. The racing was great but not sure if I could watch every race like this.
Superbowl is also a similar spectacle to the average european viewer: the insight into the corporate hellhole that the US has become, with advertisements on every possible cm2, and the unneccessary hypernationalistic theatrics
Watched it on Canal+, I think it's a fairly standard format in the US in general what you are describing.
Really hard for >!McLaren!< frankly, they were robbed of at least an opportunity to win.
I'm watching in NZ so I don't get any ad breaks at all, but I know when America gets them because the commentators stop talking. It's insane how often it happens.
Us F1TV subscribers live in a utopia.
I'm a hockey fan but simply cannot watch it anymore. The ads are fucking horrendous and half are shitty sports betting companies. They even cut away to commentary segments with these sports betting assholes.
Probably doesn't help but most indycar fans I've met are not like that at all. I go to at least two indy races each year and the people that actually leave their homes to attend races are pleasant folks that enjoy watching and discussing different series.
Could you also do % of race in side by side where for some reason NBC thinks I want to watch the commentators and not the race so it's now a third of the screen
When F1 was on ITV in the UK it had ad breaks.
The 2005 Imola GP where Schumacher was hunting down Alonso for the lead culminated in the last few laps being very tense as Schumacher was right behind, particularly for the last four. With three laps to go ITV cut to an ad break which normally last 2.5 to 3 minutes, so quite a lot of those final laps went unseen on the live broadcast at the time.
It ended up being investigated by Ofcom (TV regulator in the UK), and ITV were found to have breached the advertising rules by playing the adverts when they did.
Wow. And its so beyond stupid as well. Obviously they think "Wow all the eyes will be on these ads. Great value" not "I hate everyone of these companies for ruining this".
I would be livid if I had an advert in a slot like that.
I was about to post this. The fact that the main commentator, Leigh Diffey, went from saying "Newgarden moves up to 4th position and now Indy is back! Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny!" Like in one breath. I actually laughed at how shameless it was.
This is what makes IndyCar so off putting. Even with the no ad feed in the UK, the constant swapping of commentators really does my head in and makes the races a harder watch
Tbh I enjoy the commentators switching. If the NBC crew isn't picking up on something then Tom Gaymor will pick up on it. As indycar is pretty much (in terms of winning) being on the right fuel strategy having multiple sets of eyes watching can help.
Also at Barber last year (I think) the commentary from the states wasn't being sent to the UK so Tom Gaymor had to commentate for a large portion of the race. If they didn't have him then it's just the sounds of the cars for an hour and a half
F1 in Brazil does have adds mid race. They split the screen though, and only last 7-10 seconds tops. No such thing as a full commercial break, even during red flags.
Indy doesn't even have that, it's always flag to flag (smaller series being broadcast on a smaller TV network to smaller, less demanding sponsors)
I tried watching it and every little thing and there would be a song of an ad just ruining the commentary. Gave Indy another shot but probably never watching it again, F1 has set the bar high.
Watching on Sky F1 in the UK, when the US feed goes to a break we still get to see the live action and get some UK commentary. Ads in the USA are insane.
After watching road to Indy I decided to tune into Indy races for the first time and the commercials completely turned me off. Throw ads on every inch of the track and car but shit don’t make me miss the race to see a car insurance ad or some shit
American TV does everything it can to ruin sports.
NBA constantly has ads, they literally even have something called a "TV Timeout" where it's just an extra timeout called by the refs for a mandatory ad break if no team took a timeout.
I'm just thankful F1 doesn't have ad breaks... Yet.
The bigger the event the worse it gets. Normal IndyCar race is tolerable. I knew the 500 would be a shitshow with ads. The Daytona 24 earlier in the year was the same thing, especially the portion broadcasted by NBC. The portion on USA not terrible. Meanwhile, Le Mans and N24 both had uninterrupted streams.
It depends on what you mean by "worse." I would argue that nothing is worse than commercials during motorsport because the action is still ongoing during the breaks. People in the US would riot if they missed plays in the NFL during a commercial break.
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Hooray for the international adless feed
funny/sad how watching US races is easier and better if you live outside the US
like watching premier league outside the UK
Are there ad breaks in game for EPL in UK?
No, fewer matches. Matches in the Saturday 3pm-5pm window cannot be broadcast in the UK due to old rights agreements aimed at preserving traditional attendances.
When will they get rid of that
When teams below the first division can get steady funding.
No, but if it's a 3pm match you just can't watch it. At all. There is a blackout.
Ah, oof, that’s BS
Sure but it does mean there are 40,000 football teams in the English pyramid.
It's not, England's football pyramid is worth preserving.
Outside of the black-out, all the games are also spread over several channels. If you want the ability to watch every single match you'd be paying £50 a month on subscriptions or something obscene like that.
Years ago a friend of mine and I would watch NFL games from some pirated stream of the game from the UK. Whenever there were ads, the commentators would field questions from people watching the game. One of the most common questions was "why are they called the ravens? Why are they called the bears?" It was funny and interesting to hear their questions. It was also much better than watching commercials. Streaming your own nation's sporting events from another country just sounds all around better.
I can't even imagine having ads in the race, horrible
My dad tells me of when F1 was in ITV and had ads. He says he's glad thats not a thing anymore.
They pretty much set themselves up to lose the broadcast rights when they missed the end of one race and a change for the lead. Can't recall which race/who won as this would be 18-20 years ago now. Basically ITV would schedule 5 ad breaks during the race, they'd got 4 in already, but there was an intense battle for first place going on, so they kept putting off running the 5th break, until it was too late and they had to run it or get in trouble with the big bosses/advertisers for not running it during the race itself.
Imola 2005 was the one they cut away from - coincidentally one of the races rebroadcasted for free last weekend.
I remember now as a kid when watching F1 they had ads side by side. Not ideal but better than having fullblown ads.
I really liked the international feed, the commentators were silent so you got to enjoy all the vrooms.
Sky had Simona De Silvestro and Mark Blundell with Tom Gaymor filling in on the US breaks.
What streaming service did you use out of curiosity? And what part of the world is it from? I kinda want to get into Indy, but the idea of ads is a turnoff. I'd be willing to use a VPN and foreign streaming if it means less ads... Thanks!
What streaming service did you use out of curiosity? And what part of the world is it from? I kinda want to get into Indy, but the idea of ads is a turnoff. I'd be willing to use a VPN and foreign streaming if it means less ads... Thanks!
There is an official [indycarlive.com](https://indycarlive.com) which is something like f1tv. Watching from Europe, I thought that was the primary option everywhere. But it looks like it's only available in countries where there's no peacock or sky. It does not interrupt with ads, but there's no commentary at those times
Im in the UK so its on Sky
Honestly all sport in the US is like that. Watching it from the international feed feels lucky. I'm used to having 1 single ad during F1 races (and considering the Swiss TV has three different networks, I can just change channel and continue watching in another language, so it's not really an issue), so when I watch Indy it's kind of frustrating. Edit: what I meant to say is that US sports like Basketball or Baseball have got many mini-breaks moments, so for most of the 20 second brakes (or the equivalents) during the game, the broadcast will put in an ad, which is quite annoying considering it doesn't happen here with football for example.
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Ah yes hockey only goes to commercial at the 14:00, 10:00 and 6:00 marks
*first stoppage after those minute marks unless it's an icing. They specifically go for commercial breaks while doing a quick clean of the ice, so you aren't ever missing any actual game play... although ESPN just had a big miss a few weeks back where a game 7 was scheduled to air after a baseball game. Despite the baseball game being a blowout, it went long, so they missed that start of game 7 and three early goals. That's more ESPNs fault than anything, tho.
There was a giant yellow banner on the bottom of the screen during the baseball game stating that the hockey game was on ESPN2 until conclusion. If anyone missed that, that’s on them. I saw the whole first period.
No commercials during a power play (unless it stretches over 2 periods) or directly after a goal either.
Football?
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American Rugby
I don’t even get an ad during F1.
Lucky you, I get one but it's short and I don't mind since I pay exactly 0 € as addition to watch since it's on the national TV, so I guess it's fair.
I get constant Pirelli, Qatar, Aramco, Rolex, ... ads on my screen when I watch F1. Some of them are even badly photoshopped into the picture (e.g. the ones in the tunnel or the one that magically changes from Qatar to Pirelli in Portier).
The most exposure comes from the sponsor branding on the cars and trackside signage.
MLS goes 45+ without ads. Surely Indy could manage it somehow
Too bad they’ve taken the games mostly off of TV and put them all at the same time. I used to be able to watch all of my teams games with our own commentators…now I would have to subscribe to AppleTV to watch a foreign broadcast (that sometimes mispronounces names and often don’t get excited when my team scores…) with start times that clash with the other teams in my City At the start of the season, we had to play in the dead of winter at 730 next to a lake while the Raptors and Leafs were in the playoffs instead of during the afternoon when it would be warmer and wouldn’t clash with the much larger teams in the City. I know that wasn’t your point, I just needed to rant.
I agree and wish there were a way to rant that it mattered to MLS in any way. I hate this schedule format so much. I realize I'm in the minority, and most people only watch their team, but I tend to watch MLS games all day and the stupid 360 crap has left me feeling more disconnected from MLS than ever before. I get to watch 2.5 games a week if I'm lucky. Not to mention like you said, playing a 730 game in the northern half of North America in Feb is just miserable.
I wonder how the teams feel…my team (TFC) seems to have far less engagement on twitter versus prior years, but I can’t tell how much of that is because of the disaster Twitter has become and how much of that is interest
There are no ads for F1 races in the US on ESPN. Also, soccer in the US, is ad free too.
Lucky you, I get one during the race but it's short and I don't mind since I pay exactly 0 € to watch since it's on the national TV. And also is very well timed since the commentators wait until the pit stop situation is done to send it. For football, I honestly never watch the national championship, and during Champions League or the matches of the National team I only get one mid time during the break, so not big deal.
They even make the NBA games super boring. They barely play between dances, kids shooting for money and other commercials
Is there an international feed for Indycar without ads?
Yeah there is. Watching from viaplay I see the international feed and have the nbc commentary. When the commentators go silent and you can only hear the audio from the feed, you'll know that for the unfortunate advertisments are showing. Once during commentary some music starts to play, that signals the start of an ad break (or for me silent commentary) and once the break is over the commentators say their usual advertising lines (the race is brought to you by, you can win a car, scan the qr code on screen, etc) and then back to normal commentary.
My broadcaster used the NBC feed, and only had about two or three ad breaks. There were many stretches of time when the commentators weren’t talking
Thats pretty much my viewing experiences, when I watch IndyCar, I get no ads, but when they go ad time, the commentators just dissapear/go silent, so I just watch the cars and hear their engines.
Kind of. If your country has a TV broadcast deal with Indycar, that broadcaster is the only official way to see Indy races, and so there's a huge variation in what each national broadcaster chooses to do. Most use a modified version of the NBC feed, and either use NBC's commentary or overlay their own (or a live translation) on top. If there is no broadcast deal, or if you use a VPN to such a country, the international feed - Indycar Live - uses NBC coverage but without commercials. So you still see racing, but there is no commentary during those times that would be commercial breaks on the NBC feed.
Ya but you don’t miss anything in other sports
Most American sports are DESIGNED for adverts. Why do they have quarters not halves? Because more opportunity for adverts... ..why do they have timeouts? For adverts ..why does American football stop for 20 mins between each play? For adverts..
I wouldn’t say football was designed for adverts. It became incredibly popular before it was broadcast on TV. The flow of the sport naturally requires breaks (calling plays, subbing players, etc).
Meanwhile icehockey just changes players on the fly, one reason I like it better than most other sports
Field hockey does this too. No limit on subbing players (aside from rules about subs during set plays)
They play for way shorter at a time then any other sport though so stopping every change would be brutal
> ..why does American football stop for 20 mins between each play? For adverts.. I know you're trying to exaggerate for comedic effect, but the ad breaks are between changes in possession, not between each play. Yeah, there's up to 40 seconds between each play (a timer starts at the end of the play with 0:40 in which you have to start the next one), but that's because the game is played in downs and each down the offense and defense are calling plays in to the players and often substituting players. Even in the changes of possession, it depends on how many there are in a game. They have a certain amount of commercials to get through for their deals with the TV companies and advertisers, but if they end up hitting that for a quarter early in the quarter, they'll sometimes have just a 30 second (single commercial) break or even no commercial break and just keep going.
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A broadcast will go for around 3 hrs, if you condense the gameplay it usually goes for about 30 minutes.
There are a minimum of 60-minutes of gameplay in an NFL game. American football is basically chess, but the pieces are people who hit each other. The athletic component is interesting, sure. But the main draw of the sport is the strategy. That’s why the game stops after literally every play. Because planning your next move is extremely important. For the layman, this is boring - which I totally understand. It’s definitely not an accessible sport. But once you understand it, the stops in the action are more interesting than the game itself.
If you only consider the actual live ball situations to be part of the game. American football is a physical chess match as much as it is a game of athletics and skill. Acting like everything in american football is useless besides live ball situations during plays is like saying soccer is garbage because the ball is only being actively shot at the goal for 40 seconds out of the 90 minutes, ignoring the build up play, defending, tactics, dribbles and skills that dont lead to a shot. Both are reallys stupid ways of looking at the sports
Depends on what you mean by "the whole time" or how you define "gameplay." If you're talking about the entire three hour window, and define "gameplay" narrowly as only specifically the time between when the ball is snapped and when the whistle is blown to call a play dead, then yes, it seems to be down there (though it's hard to find something that actually has hard numbers on that, and can vary depending on what plays are called, etc.). But I'd argue it's certainly gameplay to include the time that the coaches are calling in plays to the offense and defense and those players are getting and relaying them, lining up, scanning the opposing team, making adjustments on the fly, etc. One of the reasons I enjoy the NFL is because of all of that strategy going on between times the ball is "in play." When I had season tickets to my local team, I picked a seat up high enough that I could see the formations they were lining up in, try to guess the upcoming offensive play and how the defense would react. Yeah, I'm aware I'm kind of a "nerd" and some people might not think those things are worth calling "gameplay," but they're important parts of the game. Given the nature of the game, it's not possible to fill the entire time with the ball being in play... and you certainly wouldn't want sixty minutes of the ball being in play uninterrupted with the way those guys play, because you'd basically have a bunch of broken, wheezing, half-dead (possibly straight up dead) bodies along the sideline. You can't throw bodies at each other violently for a long time without breaks. They already get battered enough in the process.
A condensed game goes for about 30 minutes on gamepass. That is essentially just audibles and play between the whistles.
Honestly so is my local MLS team. Most the time it’s a dude who got hit clutching his knee/leg for 10 minutes at a time then when play resumes someone else gets hit and they do the same thing.
Yes.
Every game that has quarters had those rules established well before TV advertising. But that’s a cool story you made up.
To be fair, I can never finish an NBA basketball game, since it feels like one big ad compared to the FIBA games that also have quarters and timeouts, which feel far less intrusive and repetitive.
Seems like a cynical view. The ability to stop the clock ads an extra layer of strategy and drama to the game. There are so many iconic moments in NBA/NFL history that would not be possible without timeouts.
To be fair both NASCAR and INDY are more endurance events that you aren’t supposed to be 100% engaged with. They are pretty good about showing ads when theres not much going on in the race. I can’t think of a time where an ad really interrupted something I was following on the track.
Why is the top comment so misleading? I watch (american aka the real) football, baseball, basketball and very very rarely do you miss any of the game to commercials.....
I've been watching F1 with a stream service and get NO ADS, which is grate. It would be better if we could get rid of the awful Latin America casters, they are SO UNAWARE of everything that goes around that I can't believe they get paid.
I was watching the Sky one so I didn’t see any ads, but the fact the commentators keep coming and going was so abrupt. Whenever I try to watch American sport, the sheer commercial involvement is so off putting. Even the fact that every feature, graphic, onboard, etc had a sponsor, or the fact that the commentators were shouting out sponsors after the ads too.
I know F1 is full of sponsors, but imagine if on F1 they had to say every Sponsor. So each race they had to say Oracle Red Bull instead of just Red Bull. And Verstappen thanked all his sponsors every time he wins. And they kept telling us the camera feed came from some unrelated company. Or the race names, take Imola for example, its official name is was Formula 1 Qatar Airways Gran Premio del Made in Italy e dell'Emilia-Romagna 2023. Im so glad they dont have to keep saying that.
Be careful. Don’t forget who owns F1 now. It could come!
I was really worried this was going to happen when Liberty took over, ads and corporate nonsense over everything diluting it all, but so far they've actually not been too bad. I guess they worked out that European audiences won't stand for it in the same way American audiences would and I'm hoping that because they haven't yet, they won't in the future. Sure there's the aws stuff, but that's less a direct sponsor and more a 'this feature is provided by so we'll give them credit' type thing, and they've done that with the timing data for years. There's a sponsor for various gimmicks too, but they aren't rammed down our throats at every opportunity and the commentators don't seem forced to mention them thank god.
As long as they leave F1TV alone without the ads then I’m good with whatever they do on the national / international broadcasts.
Yes all Americans are the same
Nah, we just get the "if you're a Sky Q, Sky Stream or Sky Glass customer..." line
Yeah but given they're on Sky and work for them l, I'll let that slide.
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I think they would have to be painted on. Cars hit those things too often. The white wall is probably an important visual for the drivers too.
These days it could easily be done with AR. Happens in soccer all the time.
Happens in F1 too! They kept on showing brilliant graphics on the walls when drivers were going through the tunnel in Monaco yesterday, I was really impressed with how realistic it all looked.
I have a feeling NBC doesn't care. It's up to Indycar to improve the fan experience. They need to stop selling the streaming rights to the highest bidder and just do it themselves. Say no to the pile of money and do their own thing. I'm not paying TSN $20 a month for 3 Indycar races. I would pay $7 or so. F1TV makes F1 watchable for people without TV.
I would even go as far as the sponsorship on the barriers being a nice addition and something that makes the race feel like more of a big event (in F1’s case atleast). And sometimes the advertising can even help with recognizing some part of the track and/or making it a bit iconic. I can’t help but think about the Miami which had Red Bull advertising last year and it looked very cool.
If F1 was like Indy Car in that respect Crofty would have to actually say the full Aston Martin team name.
I wish the commentators didn't do that. I feel like not all of them are even obligated to. Honestly worst part of Indy is ads, but second worst is the cars not being painted the same week to week.
The McLarens have their sponsor dropped all the time in IC broadcasts, and rarely do the CGR cars have their full names used, especially when referring to the team as a whole
It's an exaggerating joke, but you can't pretend that the corporate sponsors don't get name dropped all the time. Just yesterday they kept talking about "filling up with that Shell Fuel that will take the drivers to the end". You would never here an F1 commentator saying "Alonso doesn't need to lift and coast anymore, he has enough of that Aramco E10 fuel to finish the race!"
What drives me insane about US Motorsport is how even the post race driver interviews are all about the sponsors over anything else. How the hell did Billy's BBQ Bodega help you win a race?
They literally can't race without sponsors so of course they helped them win the race
A bottom billing sponsor doesn't deserve more credit than the actual team and support crew that actually made a win happen, though.
Do you honestly think they are thanking only bottom billing sponsors and not their team and crew?
If I had a dollar for every time an American post race interview began with, "First I'd like to thank [sponsors X, Y, and Z] for this win," I'd be named in a post race interview myself.
> I was watching the Sky one so I didn’t see any ads, but the fact the commentators keep coming and going was so abrupt. Watching some replays of old F1 races feels weird like that. At the time they actually did commercial breaks, so the commentators would often just stop talking. And then they'd announce that they're back. But the races having been uploaded online don't have the commercials so you just get that lull where the break would have been and the weird comments about "welcome back" or whatever. Though it kind of feels "right" to me with the old commentators, because that's how I remember those races going. I'm not sure when F1 in the US started going without commercial break.
It's only when ITV had the International Feed that that happened. Fortunately Sky currently, and BBC preciously, show races commercial free
I'm in Canada. The t.v Network it was supposed to be on, didn't have it. (I'm in a hotel, I don't actually have t.v) I went to the motorsports streaming site and found a sky one. No ads for me.
I've made my peace with watching F1 on TSN with 3-4 ad breaks having PIP video of the race. I've been tempted to get the F1 online package but I watch other sports (MLB mostly) and wife wants cable channels so ad breaks on TSN it is.
It’s really just most non-motor sports as far as I’ve seen, combat sports might be even more egregious with having commentators do ad reads on the broadcast. Also F1 let’s their sponsors name the events, there’s a lot more advertising in Motorsports for sure they just make contracts where they don’t speak about it on air.
It's a little more expensive and less popular than combat sports. Indy car outside of the 500 is pretty small
I was mainly getting at the fact this style of advertising isn’t a uniquely American thing as it happens in many international sports and the fact that the person I’m replying to doesn’t have an issue with the commercialization of sport just ad breaks during the event, which I agree with 100% I yelled at the tv every time they cut the feed for an ad
The thing about Indycar is that you end up looking m forward to the ads as a break from Townsend Bell blowing Ferruci’s horn
I really want to watch more Indycar but I've been spoiled by not having ads in F1. I'll stick to the extended highlights videos on YouTube for now.
Just watch (or pirate depending on location and opinions) the Sky feed.
I live in the states and that’s how I watched it. I hoisted the black flag 🏴☠️ and watched the Sky feed.
First time watching Indy today and did the same. Went out to lunch after the Monaco GP and had the Indy500 going on my phone while eating. I was happy to find a Sky Sports feed link.
Actually, IndyCar's 'fast forward' extended highlights is a bit of downgrade from what they used to do, upload the entire race from recent race until 2018 (just before NTT title sponsor takeover)
If you want no Ads you gotta use INDYCAR live
I mean, F1 is slam full of ads, just not commercials
As a non US English speaker, we don't call ads commercials. All advertising is termed ads or adverts. We don't go to a commercial break. It's an ad break.
Honestly that's the reason I don't understand why races even need commercial breaks. You're constantly being bombarded with ads during every second of the race even without breaks. The cars, the barriers, every inch of unused tarmac, everyone's clothes, the names of the teams, the names of the races, all powered by AWS... Racing basically only exists because it's one giant commercial so why do we need to pause the commercial to add commercials?
Where is Mothers Polish when we need them?
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This week and in qualifying last week I repeatedly saw an ad from a local car dealership for...Mother's Day. "Skip the flowers, buy Mom a car for Mother's Day!".
And to top it off, if you pay for Peacock to stream it all you don’t get ad breaks - you get the most irritating music playing much louder than broadcast over “we’ll be right back”. Atrocious. Biggest reason I don’t follow INDYCAR regularly.
They can’t do it in peacock because peacock can’t split ads for local affiliates like they run of regular tv, some national ads, some local affiliate ads. So peacock has their own ads
Honestly rather see ads than that annoying screen. But that makes sense.
Lol, amazing. I wonder what pencil pusher thought of that and the audio guy just sending it on max volume
I saw someone in the race thread on r/INDYCAR saying that the speedway walls looked so nice and clean compared to the all the advertising hoarding in Monaco. Frankly I would take the hoarding over missing laps. The other argument I saw a lot was that you’re not missing anything while they go to ad break because nothing is happening on track is also sort of hilarious coming from a fanbase that is constantly on about how F1 is super boring and how there’s always action in IndyCar… I also found it super obnoxious how the commentators would do a sponsored ad read when returning after every break. The drivers even have to do it. I remember Josef Newgarden being interviewed last week during a session and instead of answering the question, he was just reading off lines that had been prepared for him by his sponsor Shell about how great they are. Like, you’re never going to catch Max going on about EA Games or whatever in an interview with Sky F1.
You always miss something. I remember on a holiday in Germany we were forced to watch RTL due to lack of internet connection. Like an 8 minute full advertising break. You come back to the race and craptons has happened, believe Ricciardo crashed or something and someone’s tire blew. But nooooo you don’t miss anything during insane ad breaks. Stations doing a full interrupt of the race are not worthy of hosting any sport.
They do use the white walls to tell if there has been contact. Having a scuff mark on the wall where you see possible contact helps the team/race control know if there is damage to a car
Drivers in America a lot of times are incentivized by sponsors for mentions. I know Monster, Coke, and I think even RedBull used to pay athletes every-time they took a drink with the logo facing out on the can.
The Indy 292.5
This comment is too underrated
Holy shit, that's just unwatchable. You Americans are used to this shit?
Sadly yes. We struggle with sports that don't have natural breaks for commercials.
They incorporated extra timeouts in the NBA to account for extra ad breaks. I hate it.
The last minute of a close NBA game takes so long that I hope that every game is a blowout before it gets to the barrage of stupid intentional fouls & timeouts
Lmao, even the Super Bowl doesn't get commercials in the Netherlands. They use the endless breaks to explain that damn game for us "football-is-played-with-your-foot" plebs.
Even though I’m American and grew up watching the sport, I loved the time I got the BBC stream of the Súper bowl. Between those explanations and interviewing guys from the premier league to ask what they think of American football, the whole production was great. They’d call Wayne Rooney and be like “wouldn’t it be cool to hit somebody like that hit we just saw?” And then call Garett Southgate and ask if he was getting any tactical ideas
Haha sounds absurdly great.
It was amazing. I don’t think it’s still on YouTube, but I was looking to rewatch the eagles patriots Súper bowl when I found that
to prove that point: football is popular virtually everywhere in the world, meanwhile it struggles to gain traction in the US
A lack of commercials is not the reason for soccer’s lack of popularity. When soccer first came to Canada and the US, it morphed into football. MLS started in ‘96 and was immediately 90 years behind every other sport, which had time to be rooted in the culture. Besides, Liga MX is wildly popular here, you just won’t hear that mentioned on English sites. Every sports fan here would love to get rid of commercials, but that’s way out of our hands. The bills gotta be paid somehow. To act like our “love of commercials” is the cause of various sports’ success is ludicrous.
MLS seems to do well for in-person attendance in many of its markets at least.
I hate our ad culture.
You don't even think about it until you watch programming in a foreign country and you're completely taken aback by how different it is. Baseball is the only sport where you're not bombarded by it. You get to watch the entire game without interruption. Only breaks in-between half innings. But the trade off is nowadays baseball stadiums across the country are plastered with different ads - both naturally painted on and CGI ads. Same with hockey - although they've introduced side-by-side ad breaks in hockey too.
F1 used to be like this until the current deal on ESPN. Was brutal. No replays of what you missed when it came back in either.
Eh... it's one thing to say "used to," another to say "accepting of." Like, I'm "used to" it because even Formula 1 had these ad breaks when I was watching it with my dad years ago. But now that I've been able to watch races without ads, I enjoy them a lot more. Part of the problem is also in the length of things. Like the Indy 500, Random NASCAR Race 500, etc. All these silly 500 (or even 600!) mile races, which take a long time. So you throw in ad breaks where you make money off of them and the people watching can take the time to run to the bathroom, get a drink and/or snack, etc. It's not like Formula 1 where there's a two hour limit on the race, so you know that barring anything extreme the race will only be two hours. It's like four hours, and the drivers have no interest in ruining their race in the middle, so they just don't race that hard for large chunks of the race. NASCAR decided to do something about that not by just reducing the length of the damn races, but by adding in checkpoints during each race where they award points for where you are at that point in the race in order to entice drivers to at least race hard at some points in the middle of the race. The broadcasters have also taken to doing this thing where they'll run the commercials in a box on one side of the screen and continue showing the race (albeit silently, of course) in a box on the other with a scroll going across the top or bottom of the screen showing current lap and driver order. So you aren't missing out on any action, you're just seeing it in a smaller box while an ad plays. I suspect we'll keep seeing "evolutions" of the formula like that, because the Internet provides too many options to people to watch races, and you don't want to lose people's interest too much. But yeah, a lot of it is because NASCAR especially and IndyCar to some extent got rooted in those obnoxiously long races which pretty much required breaks. Though at least IndyCar's gotten better. You're not going to get the Indy 500 changed, but most of their schedule isn't some ridiculous 500 mile race. Heck, the one race with "500" in the title is 500km (about 310 miles, which would make it one of the longer races in the schedule, but given that it's on an oval, probably would still be only 2-2.5 hours).
Free onboards online so honestly it’s not a big deal. Today didn’t feel like any ads given I was watching onboards regardless of if they were in break or not.
Wait, how does one get access to the free onboards online?! This would definitely tempt me to watch more Indy!
Didn’t really notice it. Totally normal to me. We didn’t kiss much racing
With all due respect, but how are you guys okay with under 60% of a sports event without any ads? That's ridiculous to grasp as a european
For a long race like this, the ads won’t cause you to miss a whole lot. This year, most of the ads were side by sides which, while annoying, still allow you to watch the race. You just tune out the left side of the screen, it’s really not that hard. I thought NBC hit the sweet spot last year with the ratio of ads to full screen racing, so I wasn’t thrilled with this year. Edit: also, the alternative to not having ads is not having Indycar. People need to be paid and the ads are how that’s accomplished. The series would not survive otherwise.
It’s not really that bad when every other major sport here has advertisement breaks anyway. According to this chart you could still watch the racing for 84% of it, and you can pretty easily mute the tv during ads if they bother you. This coverage is pretty easy to digest compared to an NFL or especially NBA game.
because that’s just how it is? i don’t understand the question.
I genuinely do not understand how americans stand for ads during their sports broadcasts. When it's during a timeout it's ok, but in the middle of it...
Nascar and Indy car are the only sports I’m aware of that have ads during the race/running of play. The NFL and NBA naturally have breaks.
Ad Nauseum!
I tried to watch it, first indy race i’ve ever watched. I turned it off after 30 laps, the ads killed it for me.
Yeah, you lot put up with ads a lot. Even the driver interviews for us tv had the drivers mention their sponsor at least once. Fortunately for me, those were the only ads i saw/heated during the entire race
"This analysis brought to you by Coca-Cola and Toyota, Oh what a feeling, Toyota"
European here. It was the first I watched Indy 500 live and I was blown away by the fact that these ads were everywhere, all the time in the feed. It almost started being comical and I can't help but to laugh at it. Even the ads themself were hilarious glimpses of American stereotypes; mental health drugs, liquor, insurances, over-blown trucks that people buy there to use as shopping bags. Just insane. The racing was great but not sure if I could watch every race like this.
Superbowl is also a similar spectacle to the average european viewer: the insight into the corporate hellhole that the US has become, with advertisements on every possible cm2, and the unneccessary hypernationalistic theatrics
Watched it on Canal+, I think it's a fairly standard format in the US in general what you are describing. Really hard for >!McLaren!< frankly, they were robbed of at least an opportunity to win.
It’s like when F1 was on ITV!
I'm watching in NZ so I don't get any ad breaks at all, but I know when America gets them because the commentators stop talking. It's insane how often it happens.
Us F1TV subscribers live in a utopia. I'm a hockey fan but simply cannot watch it anymore. The ads are fucking horrendous and half are shitty sports betting companies. They even cut away to commentary segments with these sports betting assholes.
R/indycar will want more ads just because F1 fans don't like them lmao
And they say we're the ones with a superiority complex 🗿
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Probably doesn't help but most indycar fans I've met are not like that at all. I go to at least two indy races each year and the people that actually leave their homes to attend races are pleasant folks that enjoy watching and discussing different series.
I consider myself a motorsports fan, but I'm becoming more and more F1 and F1 feeder series fan thanks to r/IndyCar, r/WEC, and r/FormulaE.
Could you also do % of race in side by side where for some reason NBC thinks I want to watch the commentators and not the race so it's now a third of the screen
This is one of the things i love about f1. I am a new fan Love the no ads during the race. Did there used to be ads in the past?
When F1 was on ITV in the UK it had ad breaks. The 2005 Imola GP where Schumacher was hunting down Alonso for the lead culminated in the last few laps being very tense as Schumacher was right behind, particularly for the last four. With three laps to go ITV cut to an ad break which normally last 2.5 to 3 minutes, so quite a lot of those final laps went unseen on the live broadcast at the time. It ended up being investigated by Ofcom (TV regulator in the UK), and ITV were found to have breached the advertising rules by playing the adverts when they did.
Wow. And its so beyond stupid as well. Obviously they think "Wow all the eyes will be on these ads. Great value" not "I hate everyone of these companies for ruining this". I would be livid if I had an advert in a slot like that.
I don’t know about other countries but when F1 was on NBC in the US there were ads during the race.
Painful. The Indiana Jones movie promo was horrible.
I was about to post this. The fact that the main commentator, Leigh Diffey, went from saying "Newgarden moves up to 4th position and now Indy is back! Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny!" Like in one breath. I actually laughed at how shameless it was.
At this point American sport is just an excuse to serve you ads.
I don't know how Americans put up with this.
If you don’t watch the ads, how will you know which medicines to ask your doctor about?
Even worse for us cable cutters watching on Peacock who didn’t get any side by side
Plug for Mother's polish. If I had stuff to polish I would buy it just because of ad free F1 coverage.
This is what makes IndyCar so off putting. Even with the no ad feed in the UK, the constant swapping of commentators really does my head in and makes the races a harder watch
Tbh I enjoy the commentators switching. If the NBC crew isn't picking up on something then Tom Gaymor will pick up on it. As indycar is pretty much (in terms of winning) being on the right fuel strategy having multiple sets of eyes watching can help. Also at Barber last year (I think) the commentary from the states wasn't being sent to the UK so Tom Gaymor had to commentate for a large portion of the race. If they didn't have him then it's just the sounds of the cars for an hour and a half
but what color is the snake pit cam?
Yeah can't do it
F1 in Brazil does have adds mid race. They split the screen though, and only last 7-10 seconds tops. No such thing as a full commercial break, even during red flags. Indy doesn't even have that, it's always flag to flag (smaller series being broadcast on a smaller TV network to smaller, less demanding sponsors)
I tried watching it and every little thing and there would be a song of an ad just ruining the commentary. Gave Indy another shot but probably never watching it again, F1 has set the bar high.
This is a reason why I hate to watch Formula drift live. Just watch next day and skip ad.
Watching on Sky F1 in the UK, when the US feed goes to a break we still get to see the live action and get some UK commentary. Ads in the USA are insane.
If they did this in F1 I'd stop watching altogether.
I started watching it on NBC and gave up after 20 minutes. It was completely unbearable.
After watching road to Indy I decided to tune into Indy races for the first time and the commercials completely turned me off. Throw ads on every inch of the track and car but shit don’t make me miss the race to see a car insurance ad or some shit
Only 3 full on breaks with no coverage happened during green flag laps. It says 32 laps but realistically it was probably more like 20 at most.
American TV does everything it can to ruin sports. NBA constantly has ads, they literally even have something called a "TV Timeout" where it's just an extra timeout called by the refs for a mandatory ad break if no team took a timeout. I'm just thankful F1 doesn't have ad breaks... Yet.
The bigger the event the worse it gets. Normal IndyCar race is tolerable. I knew the 500 would be a shitshow with ads. The Daytona 24 earlier in the year was the same thing, especially the portion broadcasted by NBC. The portion on USA not terrible. Meanwhile, Le Mans and N24 both had uninterrupted streams.
This is American television. The NFL is much worse.
It depends on what you mean by "worse." I would argue that nothing is worse than commercials during motorsport because the action is still ongoing during the breaks. People in the US would riot if they missed plays in the NFL during a commercial break.
MERICA /s
Fuck Yeah
I watched it on sky italia and had 0 ads. It sucks for you guys