“I grew up watching the races live on free TV”– Lewis Hamilton shares his objections to subscription model applied by F1 broadcasters

“I grew up watching the races live on free TV”– Lewis Hamilton is not impressed with subscription models used to watch F1 races.

With over-reliability on advertisements seemed to hinder the broadcasters, several companies, including Formula 1 broadcasters, majorly shifted to the subscription model.

Where the viewers are the direct source of income and not the advertisements, therefore there are little to no ads being shown during the event.

However, Lewis Hamilton is not pleased with the idea of people paying to watch F1 races and cites his childhood days, when he used to watch it for free, and millions of people used to tune in at the same time.

“I grew up watching the races live on free TV, which attracted a lot of fans,” he tells Motorsport-total.com. “I remember in Spain there were four to six million people tuning in every afternoon at 2pm. That was pretty impressive.”

He then talks about him having to pay for everything, and he has to watch on the television from Netflix to any other content available, he calls it a ‘trend’,

“There seems to be a trend that you have to pay for what you want to see on TV. You have to pay for Netflix, you have to pay for anything you want to watch. So that’s a transition. The world has changed in that respect.”

Subscription model making media self-reliable

The agenda of fake news and propaganda are the end products of advertisements, with corporates and governments supplying ads to the media organizations that had held them by their neck and weren’t pleased with anything going against them.

Meanwhile, in sports, advertisements usually broke the ongoing action, as the broadcasters desired to reap as much profits they can, and in movies, ad breaks were also a big hesitance.

Therefore, according to us, it seems that subscriptions are not that bad and give fans a scope for more access to the related content and replays.

About the author

Tanish Chachra

Tanish Chachra is the Motorsport editor at The SportsRush. He saw his first race when F1 visited India in 2011, and since then, his romance with the sport has been seasonal until he took up this role in 2020. Reigniting F1's coverage on this site, Tanish has fallen in love with the sport all over again. He loves Kimi Raikkonen and sees a future world champion in Oscar Piastri. Away from us, he loves to snuggle inside his books.

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