MARCH 17, 2003

Canada's TSN dumps Speed Channel feed

The Canadian broadcaster TSN has abandoned its brief experiment using the Speed Channel feed and will revert to the British ITV commentary. TSN has used British feeds for almost 10 years.

TSN and Speed did a deal in order to share the costs of F1 which is expensive for any broadcaster but the problem is that Speed's audiences are so small that it cannot justify sending a crew to all the races and the commentary struggled badly as they tried to commentate of the Australian race from a studio in North Carolina.

ITV has a crew at every race and so is in a better position to produce a good program.

"The quality is better," says Phil King, the TSN executive in charge of programming. "Our viewers told us that and we agree. We were not satisfied with the quality of the Speed Channel broadcast."