TBK-Light.com

Seems like pretty dodgy logic to me, surely the number of fans (trackside or otherwise) gained from live TV coverage makes the drop in attendance negligible. You're still left with a far bigger audience overall.

Don't shoot the messenger lol.
I do know of one family last year that did exactly that, i.e. stayed home and watched on tv instead of going cos it was raining.

I'd love to know the viewing figures. In some ways, ITV4 covering most of the day live is a throwback to Grandstand showing all kinds of racing in the 80s, but then Grandstand was dropped by the BBC 11 years ago because of poor ratings - mainly because having more channels meant people were less likely to sit at home and watch the whole thing, especially if something came on they weren't as interested in, whereas in the past they didn't have much choice. However, there must be something in it for ITV because they picked up that package from Motors quite a few years ago now and they're still showing it

I suppose Gow's logic comes from the Super Touring era where they were able to produce a very neat highlights package that could be shown on Grandstand, with Murray doing a great job pretending he was commentating live and all the boring bits cut out (and evidently there were a lot of them, as fun as that era was - I can remember watching some of the live ST races and they were probably on a par with today's better F1 races). That was something that worked for British F3 too

But that doesn't work so well in an era of satellite/digital TV, let alone live streaming. It used to be a real novelty to see highlights of the DTM, FIA GT or F3000 on TV (on Top Gear Motorsport or International Motor Racing) - and given that it was so hard to get hold of results, you would be watching it as if it was live anyway. But it feels like the chase for live sport probably killed off the idea that you could have race highlights on one of the main TV channels at a reasonable time (rather than 23:35 or whatever). Having a highlights package for F2 on, say, ITV wouldn't work now because most people who are interested would have seen it live, or would at least know the result

Viewing figures and some thoughts from Gow here

https://f1broadcasting.co/

If the FIA keep insisting on BTCC and F1 clashing, i can see next year I will easily be prioritising live BTCC coverage and save F1 for highlights later in the day.