There is no argument that F1 would have bigger audiences overall if it went back to being completely free-to-air. But would a switch and better headline viewership figures actually be of overall benefit to the sport? It's something that F1's director of media rights Ian Holmes is especially sceptical of.
For while he acknowledges that free-to-air television will always bring more viewers than something broadcast at the same time on pay-TV, actually understanding what is best overall for the sport is a much more complicated thing to appreciate.
"There's no point in comparing live free with live paid," he says. "What we have found, and this is not just the case with Sky because you could equally say it with someone like Canal+ in France, quite a mature pay television platform, is the amount of marketing that they put behind their premium rights, and how they push out their content. It goes over and above their live ratios and so on.
"We got more exposure than ever before the season even started when we first did that Sky deal. I remember driving around and seeing massive billboards everywhere. We never had that before."
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This year has, however, has marked two significant changes in F1's TV picture, with the huge markets of Germany and Brazil moving channels. Both examples show why just looking at Sunday afternoon race viewing figures does not provide the perfect insights in the pros and cons of the switches.
In Germany, free-to-air RTL is no longer broadcasting every race live and instead will show just four events, with Sky showing all sessions live. The end of the RTL deal was a big thing for Germany, but Holmes says the reality of declining advertising revenue for free-to-air broadcasters meant it no longer made financial sense to continue.
"What we've seen over the course of the last nine years or so with our RTL renewals reflects where free to air commercial television is in the world of paying for rights," he said. "With each renewal, the rights went down. They are a business, and they can't sell their advertising for the numbers that they used to be able to. With advertising, while the actual pot is probably the same, it now gets spent in different areas and good old digital mops up an increasingly large share of that."
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The greater willingness of people to pay for quality content, especially as pay TV channels demand ever greater exclusivity, appears to have triggered positive momentum behind Sky's audience figures in the UK. When Channel 4 was last broadcasting races regularly live in 2018, it was drawing in around 2 million viewers per race, with Sky getting less than one million. For this year's season opener in Bahrain, Sky delivered its biggest ever TV figure up until that point – with an average of 1.98 million watching the race and a peak of 2.23 million.
