Motorsport.tv: Racing Videos for Android

It would be amazing to not have a pay wall on it

The subscription has very few full races, so if that is of interest, I would avoid this. Specifically I was looking at the Extreme E, Formula E, and Formula W, along with a handful of others, none of which had full races. This feels like a very large misrepresentation of what is available, and given there is no trial, there was no way to know for certain without subscribing. This is a poor service model. Hopefully I will be able to get a refund through Google for this limited access service.

Motorsport.tv app is the best thing around to get your fix of racing videos and livestream. Their first version was fine but this 2.0 version took care of all the issues and works flawlessly. I watched different livestreams last weekend with no buffering or drop. Amazing, considering that even YouTube buffers out. Content is great too. I just wish they would have F1 live racing on Motorsport.tv rather than counting on the buggy F1TV app.

This is a good service hindered by a few limitations, mostly in terms of UI. (Writing this in early June 2019, and 2.0 just got released, so keep in mind some or all of these might have been fixed!) 1) Not supporting picture-in-picture or even split screen! It’s amazing I can finally watch full SuperGT races! But that would be three hours where my Mobile is a dedicated monitor to one thing. Not a good oversight when every streaming service has this. 2) basic sorting— on a series’ page, the strip listing full races helpfully includes future live broadcasts, but they seem to be totally randomized instead of chronological order? It’s super confusing. Similarly the list of Programs is poorly organized. There’s several different ones for the WEC: “Inside WEC” has individual race summaries from 2017, “FIA WEC Live Racing” has one episode recap of the entire 2016 season, and another called “Special events” which is weirdly just an ACO press conference about the 2018 Le Mans, and so on. Dakar & Rally Raid events has a similar problem; F1 news has at least five or six different channels. With as much content as motorsport.tv has- and to be clear, there’s a TON of great content here!— collating these better would be tremendously useful to get a picture of what’s on offer. (A search function would also be useful, given how much there is to navigate!) 3) When using the free version, there’s a blue corner to denote paid-membership content, which is fine, that’s a good signal. However, there’s a bunch of videos Without that corner, appearing free, that preview the first two minutes before prompting the membership upgrade screen. This is reeeaally bad UI. A second marker noting “preview available” would be helpful but as is, this will make users paranoid about what is or isn’t available. 4) Given the large diversity of content, you really gotta to include the run time under the thumbnail. In non-races alone, you have 5-10 minute tech analyses, to half-hour-to-an-hour race previews/summaries, to full two-hour documentaries. Less important things I assume are already on the list but worth mentioning: Chromecast support, being able to favorite or otherwise bookmark content to watch later. Basically, I hope the app gets nearly as good as the service, because I’m enthusiastically looking forward to being a paying subscriber!

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