Moose wrote: ↑31 Oct 2017, 03:07
zeph wrote: ↑30 Oct 2017, 06:00
This could be the best US F1 news ever. If they keep cost reasonable, I'd happily pay for a season pass if it allows to watch without commercial interruptions.
I'm thinking $3 per race or $60 for a season. If it is more than that, I may still do it, but it won't be a no-brainer.
I think your pricing expectations are likely to be out by roughly an order of magnitude. Consider - a movie is typically of the order of $10-15 for 2 hours of entertainment. A race weekend reliably gives 4 hours of entertainment (1 hour qualifying, 2 hours race, half an hour of pre-race and pre-qualifying), and more like 8-10 hours for people like us who are really into it. I fully expect to see liberty charging $20 a race weekend.
Perhaps, we'll see. In the Bernie years, I would have been inclined to agree.
But Liberty Media has talked a lot about growing the sport, and attracting a younger audience. You don't do that by pricing it out of reach.
Netflix costs $8-15 p/m and gives access to thousands (or millions?) of movies and TV shows. Apple Music costs $10-15 p/m and gives access to hundreds of millions of songs. That is the new reality of streaming, and pricing expectations of the general public have changed accordingly.
If LM starts their streaming service at $400 for a season pass, my guess is they'll soon find out that's gonna be a tough -or impossible- sell.
Steve Jobs famously said: "Price it aggressively, and go for volume", and I think that should be the objective here.
Netflix' 100 million+ subscribers account for more than a billion dollars p/m in revenue. That's a fairly large amount of cash.
I'm not entirely sure about F1's TV viewing figures, but a perfunctory google search suggests that it's around 3.5 million viewers per race and 400 million viewers per year?
[please correct me if I'm wrong here]
Say you get 1 percent of those viewers to pay for a $400 season pass, that is $1.6 billion in revenue. Get 10 percent of those viewers to pay for a $60 season pass, and it's $2.4 billion. Etc. etc.
I'm pulling these numbers out of my posterior, but you get the point.
P.S.
You used movie purchase prices as a reference point; I believe rental prices are a more realistic starting point. Out here it's typically $5.99 for new releases, with prices dropping to $3.99 after a few months.
