Inside Line: I agree with President Todt

Hardly the best way to entice viewers and grow viewership, but that's how RTL do it.

Granted when running the final set of ads, late in the race, they tend to flight the advert with the live coverage reduced to a box in the bottom the corner of the screen - at least you can watch that.

The earlier ads have no such insert, and when you are watching an exciting race the sudden ads in your face are pure agony and appear to take forever!

I live in Germany so this is first-hand info, with my son we watch the Formula 1 on RTL because we can have it on our big screen, but because my German is not very good I switch to English commentary so down with the volume and on goes the F1 App commentary which is synchronised.

Fortunately, when the ads come on the big TV and blank out the race at random, the commentary continues so one is still in the loop.

To make double sure we miss nothing I also fire up the F1TV App on the iPad and catch the images of the race there which for some reason are not quite live - there is a delay with the terrestrial signal hitting my screen in Berlin about a minute before it streams onto my iPad.

Nevertheless, this allows us to keep an eye on things when the ads invade the big screen.

I digress, back to Mr Todt's criticism of RTL which was quoted in Welt am Sonntag: "I recently watched the broadcast of the Brazilian Grand Prix on RTL, it turned me into the most frustrated television viewer imaginable."

"I got more advertising shown to me than a Formula 1 race... If I was a German Formula 1 fan and watching it on RTL, sorry, but I would be frustrated and disappointed with Formula 1."

Absolutely spot on. Watching a race truncated with ads in this manner cannot be appealing to Formula 1 fans, and is hardly going to appeal to a younger audience that the sport is targeting. Incidentally, the majority of the ads are beer or car related.

The response from RTL's sports boss Manfred Loppe was priceless as he took a swipe at Todt: "We cannot understand why the FIA president criticises us, given that two years ago we were awarded broadcaster of the year at the FIA Gala."

"Todt's statement also does not correspondent with the significant increase in our viewership this year and the great appreciation that Liberty Media has shown us."

But also shot himself in the foot when he added, "Since 1991 we have broadcast Formula 1 and the business model has remained always the same."

That's the root of the problem: RTL are delivering what appears to be a good F1 show in nineties mode to this day.

The business of live TV broadcasting has evolved immensely since 1991 and the competition - that little thing called the Internet - has since mushroomed from nowhere and forced everyone in the media industry (except RTL it appears) to redefine the business model several times in this period.

Surely they should have reinvented their business model to adapt to ongoing changes, if not something is seriously amiss with the German broadcaster.

The most obvious solution is to run the ads but every time drop the live F1 feed into a box at the bottom of the screen as they tend to do late in the race.

Other ideas would be to run footer or header strap advertising on the live feed, or get a title sponsor and brand the feed, or change the rules and insert the adverts in a box within the feed.

While the sport (make that the entire world) and TV technology has changed radically in the 27 years he refers to, it might be opportune for Herr Hopp and his team to start catching up with the times and providing a more viewer-friendly, non-interruption to accommodate advertisers at the expense of viewers/fans

I must conclude by sharing that when 1991 was mentioned, my memory bank went into flashback mode. I used to watch F1 live on TV, in South Africa, around that time on (SABC) and that is exactly what they would do: anytime during the race boom! they cut in with adverts! And several times at that. Talk about deja vu?

For today's standards, that kind of 'viewers don't matter television' is unacceptable as Mr President suggested and does more damage for the sport than good.

Time to wake up RTL, this is not the nineties anymore!