To end the year on a positive note, it is nice to see that Tata Communications is pushing for better technology for Formula 1, with the F1 Connectivity Innovation Prize. The jury, which included Lewis Hamilton and Martin Brundle, selected a four-man British team as winners of the prize for their ideas about how to catalogue 60,000 hours of footage that Formula One Management has in its archives. The four will share a prize of $50,000 and two of them will attend next year’s Monaco GP as guests of Tata Communications. The winning team – Jody Allen, Tom Williams, Chris Randall and Chris Belmore from London submitted a user-centric solution that could empower fans around the world to contribute to the process of cataloguing over 60,000 hours of video. Searching the archive, which has already been tagged with baseline metadata, fans could explore the relevant race and using the simple editing interface, find and clip their moment. The fan community would vote on the winning clips and the winners could receive VIP prizes.
“There were lots of really strong entries for all three challenges,” said Lewis Hamilton. “The competition really seemed to engage the fans and sparked some great responses. The winning solution understood how race fans think and act, and how our sport can develop ways to connect with our fans at the race tracks and at home.”
Mehul Kapadia, MD of the F1 Business at Tata Communications says that the challenge will be back in the future.
“We at Tata Communications decided to partner with Formula One Management and Mercedes AMG Petronas to give fans around the world a chance to show their creativity and passion for the sport. This has been a genuinely global competition, and we’re proud to have been a catalyst for some truly visionary thinking.”
joeblogsf1 
Great and positive initiative by Tata. I was very excited to be a part of the competition. Especially as I won the individual prize for Challenge 3 and send my congratulations to the team winners from Challenge 3 that also won the Grand prize! Looking forward to Monaco as well and the next challenge too!
Interesting idea… but wouldn’t that mean FOM would have to allow fans to actually see the film footage they’ve been warehousing?
I realize that normal people might think a sport would *want* people to watch its history, but FOM seems to think that a very bad idea… I suppose their plan is to keep the sport’s history a secret… thus thwarting those who might be guilty of the sins of being *interested* and *curious* about F1… (can’t have young neer-do-wells get away with that…)
Also, why do only 2 of the 4 get to go? is it an effort to indoctrinate the up-and-comers into F1’s divide-and-conquer mentality? Perhaps trying to create a squabble among the innovators?
Ooops… I see this is about being positive… sorry…
Yes, just imagine if new fans could see races from the 70’s/80’s and 90’s….they might just conclude that it was way better back then…..probably why FOM wants to keep the secrets locked away.
My nomination for Posts-of-the-Season award.
Ouch, too true! Seconded.
Actually, I find this prize quite the opposite of positive, or appealing. If you think just a moment, what treasures are buried by the inept, the incompetent, the Dog In Mangers and halfwit profiteers who can’t seem to make a profit from such a trove, such a horde of most valuable footage, it is actually a insult, saying “Hara har, look what we have, and you don’t. Weep at how we pat on the head some nice boys for doing what is actually now a so commonplace job of archival retrieval as to be commonplace, solved decades ago by any broadcaster of note, and keep on sobbing how this is obviously not something real, that you can use or might even hope to see any time soon!”
It’s a taunt, not a tribulation.
Coincidentally, I spent a month this past fall, learning how MPEG-DASH is the current standard effort in video retrieval and much related. My first job paid me for appreciating broadcast media, then all called multimedia, systems. There is potential, lots of it, and in fact, if the F1 footage were ever subject to a serious effort, it would make some waves in a oft moribund, or plain tired, industry. I highly recommend Ted Turner’s autobio, “Call Me Ted”, for a idea how powerful joined up programming is, and how fundamental a concept it is, yet almost never figured out.
There’s another aspect to why I find this prize less than appealing: yet again, this is a roll out of a for profit enterprise depending on community contributions for the spade work. I think F1 fans have been milked enough.
Whilst this is great news and positive publicity for F1 I am a little puzzled.
Don’t FOM own all the video (after a certain date) and don’t they have a team of hawks constantly scanning the web for any seconds of F1 footage? If any sections of video are posted (usually on youtube) they are removed by FOM or it’s agents sometimes within minutes, certainly a couple of hours.
So does this now mean that FOM have changed their policy on closely guarding all F1 video? If not, while the prizewinners are no doubt to be congratulated there is no point in the exercise.
If they think that fans are going to pay a fee to watch a clip they are mistaken.
Oh, I am quite sure that you will have to pay…
The idea is a good one . . . Positive Start.
If access fees are involved then one would assume that FOM will be compensating the global cataloguers for their efforts.
If, however, FOM is to be reliant on an army of enthusiastic ‘volunteers’ then the service would need to be a free addition to the F1 ‘network’ –
Otherwise I would have to agree with ‘rpaco’ . . .
The scheme would be ‘dead-on-arrival’ . . . Negative End.
If FOM is smart, they will allow fans to obtain low-res limited duration clips for free, and charge a reasonable amount of money for high-res longer-duration material. However, given the uttterly inept and backward-looking way in which FOM has been handling social media as a marketing platform until now, I’m not holding my breath.
Have a Great Christmas Joe!
I think that by the time any of this happens, the idea of low res free high rest premium will be completely gone. Consider how good non HD footage can be, in uncompressed format. Have a look at some old S-VHS recordings of racism off the broadcast feed, if you can. For lots of technical reasons, standard definition can be very good indeed. The difference claimed now for HD versus standard def is entirely artificially engineered to be far greater than it should be. Now, clean uncompressed HD versus standard def, i’ll sure take the HD, thank you. But it’s the deliberate reduction on quality of any feed that’s not HD, that makes a false comparison.
I bet there will be…
Nah, this involves being smart…
When AOL lived on the virtue of their forums, they gave free access away to their moderators and prominent posters,
So that would be a model to try, here.
It takes a lot more than that, to work something like this. I spent most of a year on a community interest based photo site, that had some extremely nice incentives built up, to provide a hierarchy of participation interests. That idea had a lot of man years out into it, and may resurface in another guise. But whilst that startup fell on some genuinely technical economics, some of the storage and bandwidth math never quite stacked up, it was a case study on how you get quality content furnished for free, like this idea of identifying clips by skilled observers to provide metadata and then search results and then views.
I think that any community effort dealing with media and a real fantasy has to be independent. There’s the rub, the footage is proprietary. To get real involvement, you need a higher standard of trust, than I think the FIA or FOM could generate. Certainly, a effort like this could be seen to improve relations, but to be successful it requires a chicken and egg resolution that seems unlikely.
I assume that this isn’t ever going to happen since it would appeal to non rolex wearing folk under 70 years of age ?
This is a nice idea – if it became reality. Because as far as I understand it, Bernie Ecclestone keeps a very tight rein on the archives and in fact there are people constantly scouting such sites as You Tube to have any F1 clips taken down. Sometimes I think the man has a gun permanently pointing and firing at his foot. Although I imagine he would allow this idea to pass – for a fat fee from the punters, I imagine.
Bernie’s worried that people might see footage of cars with more grunt than grip and think that it’s more fun to watch than modern racing…. Although it’s been fun to see (and hear!) cars slide around in 2014
This competition was a joke, half of Europe, Africa and Asia was excluded, due to “local regulations prohibiting these people to enter”. Makes me think something fishy was going on.
Maybe there wasn’t, but they definitely lost out on a number of great ideas because of that.
this is a move in the right direction. whether it makes sense financially to fans already strapped for cash to access their sport remains to be seen.
“The competition really seemed to engage the fans …………………………. and ………………… develop ways to connect with our fans……………”
Did Lewis Hamilton really say that? I don’t think so! If he did I suspect he’s planning to stand for election to Parliament.