Volvo on TV

The poor coverage in the UK of this Volvo has not helped Britain and Portsmouth's bid to remain involved in future races.

The company with the TV rights - ITV - has given the Volvo totally piss-poor support. Not only have they chosen to broadcast it at 4am on its lowest priority ITV4 channel, it feels it can re-arrange the schedules bumping the Volvo at will.

Two recent recordings I tried to make both failed due to last minute re-schedules that failed to make the EPG so all I had to watch over the weekend was yet more football. Consequently I missed all the TV coverage of the Volvo while in Portsmouth - ironic really given it was the only UK port of this race.

I hope that future rights go to a broadcaster that treats it better. The only thing worse than what ITV has done would for it to go to a subscription company like Sky, which would basically lock out the majority of the UK's population who don't or won't subscribe.

Given the rate of technology movement, why doesn't the Volvo itself stream broadcast quality feeds from their web site? 2 Mbps broadband is common now and we can envisage 8 Mbps being widely available for the next race, easily enough for DTV quality.

The objective of the organisers is publicity for the sponsors and that can not be helped by TV rights to companies like ITV with so little interest in promoting it.