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Originally Posted by NaBUru38
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Thanks for that link. Either my lack of understanding how the broadcast rights work is quite bad, or maybe that article is poorly written. This part in particular confuses me...
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Neither side would comment on financials, but ESPN is not believed to be paying a rights fee for the programming and will rely on a world feed to carry the races.
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(my bold)
This makes ZERO sense to me. There is no way FOM just lets ESPN broadcast without paying a fee. It is my understanding that ALL broadcasters use the world feed content (produced by FOM's broadcast arm). Then they can add whatever extra (such as commentary by their own team) to craft their own broadcast. Additionally, per posts in the UK F1 broadcast thread, it seems that FOM also owns the rights to those customized broadcasts as well. So for example FOM owns the rights to the NBC content that is created today and would be the same for the ESPN content in the future. I assume that is done for many reasons. But mostly to protect the IP that FOM has given it is derivative work of licensed content.
Regarding NBC not being involved going forward...
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The circuit's OTT rights are not part of this deal, as F1 will retain control over those rights -- a position that proved to be a sticking point with NBC, which had carried races on NBCSN since '13.
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So I assume that previously NBC had "exclusive" rights for the US market. That they could pick and choose what they showed via the main free to view/OTT "NBC" channels or broadcast on pay (via cable or sat) NBCSN or maybe via an NBC streaming app (not sure if that existed as I never would have used it).
As to a "sticking point" with NBC, I assume it's not so much that FOM was keeping the rights for free/OTT but rather NBC was probably not willing to pay whatever FOM wanted to allow NBC to keep the exclusive rights for the US market (current NBC deal).
I assume that the ESPN deal is not exclusive so that FOM was able to work separate deals for free/OTT with ABC. NBC wouldn't have wanted to broadcast some stuff on NBCSN and then have ABC (a direct competitor) do select races OTT. So that is probably the conflict.
Richard