F1's quest for a saviour is embarrassing

Formula 1 is a bit like a grandparent wanting to be introduced to the latest technological gizmo.

In fact, it comes across as a gaggle of grandparents, waiting for a relative more in-tune with the modern world to bring them up to speed on how things work in the 21st century.

In many ways this comparison is unfair...to grandparents. They don't deserve to be grouped in with a bunch of people who have got rich from something that has become outdated, and are now sat around hoping for a hero to save the day and make them rich all over again.

That's the role F1's new owners and chairman Chase Carey have been given. Carey is being pitched as some sort of mastermind who holds the key that will unlock the magic box of internet dollars, putting everything right with the F1 world again.

The celebratory way that Carey and Liberty Media have been lauded by senior paddock figures has bordered on cringeworthy. The greedy assumption seems to be "he knows how to make money out of the internet and social media", which is about the most cliched, ignorant position anyone can take when they don't understand those avenues.

The fact is F1 is so far behind in those areas that even if Carey & co are internet geniuses, they don't actually need to reinvent the wheel at all. Simply catching up to the other leading entities in the sporting world would be a start. No original thinking required.

Carey has been given an image in F1 - not of his own making - as the answer to all of its modern media problems. But beyond hopefully being better at framing contracts to allow TV broadcasters, and Formula One Management's own outlets, more flexibility when it comes to using rights-restricted material (race weekend footage, to simplify it), what exactly do F1's forward thinking new owners really need to bring to the table?

Let's take one of Bernie Ecclestone's go-to soundbites - that he doesn't know how to make money out of social media and he hopes the people coming in can work it out.

To start with a slight defence of Ecclestone, he has a point. "Just give everything away on social media" has often been put forward as some sort of brilliant masterplan, but where is the value in that? Ecclestone is right to be sceptical, and it's understandable that someone as successful at striking lucrative deals as he has been is cautious about suddenly giving away valuable material in the hope of gaining some online (free) followers.

F1 has made what limited progress it can under its current restrictions in recent years, using TV-feed screen grabs to illustrate key incidents, plus putting out interesting short videos (providing it's not current-season footage, which is blocked) and producing bespoke graphics and mini-features to give its social media outlets something worthwhile.

It seems to be working, with Twitter (2.3million followers), Facebook (2.7m) and Instagram (1.7m) all generating a growing audience.

But to take F1's social media output to the next level, and maybe even monetise it, there's no need for Super Chase to blast through the door with revolutionary ideas. We'll use the NFL as an example, because as is so often the case, American sports pick up on these sorts of things way before the rest of the world.

In recent days its Twitter feed - which boasts 20million followers - it has featured fantasy football posts sponsored by KFC (a 'bucket' of player choices, seriously), but more relevant to F1, it has a wealth of video clips all of which carry adverts at the start. Audi, Ford, Pizza Hut, Pepsi and Bank of America are some of the companies involved.

As it happens, the NFL has been in the news this week for imposing restrictions on what its teams can do with video footage from games, drawing criticism for banning them from using clips while a match is taking place, from kick-off to one hour after it finishes.

The league has also specified which platforms (Periscope and YouTube) can be used for live streaming of press conferences, and teams are now limited to posting roughly 45 videos per day. Hardly draconian.

If you offered F1 teams those terms for using rights-restricted video material they would bite your hand off. Instead, they have to make do with creating videos shot outside the paddock (often in their own factories) adding either still images or filming-day footage that is usually shot pre-season.

Switching to the type of football that is closer to home for most of the grid - soccer - even the world leader in that form of the game TV rights-wise, the Premier League, posts videos of goals, and lets teams use footage for their own feeds.

As an example, if McLaren wants to wish a hero such as Mika Hakkinen a happy birthday, it can only attach still images of the Flying Finn. If a Premier League team wants to do the same with one of its legendary players, it can trawl the archives for his best moments or goals and put together a video montage.

For a recent comparison, a few days after McLaren's Hakkinen post generated 379 retweets and 995 likes, Manchester United posted a 58-second video celebrating the birthday of its star striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic - including action and goals from this season - which generated nearly 5000 retweets and more than 6500 likes.

It's through ideas like these that English football teams can become famous the world over, generating eye-watering sponsorship and TV revenues, which in turn helps the sporting competition as it allows more teams to compete financially. What F1 would give for such a scenario.

Talking of video, there is one portal, potentially the most important in terms of the future of the internet, where F1 languishes way off the pace: YouTube.

You are not about to read suggestions that F1 should put its entire video library on YouTube for free, along with live streaming of races, just to boost the number of hits on its channel.

But it appears that even under the current level of restriction, which remarkably even limits the output of the official Formula1.com website, F1 is short-changing YouTube as a platform. The rules blocking current-season footage being used also apply here, even to F1's official channel! No wonder it only has 237,000 subscribers here at the time of writing - way off the pace of its other channels.

Why is this naive? It's not just because lots of people would watch the videos if more of them went on YouTube. As mentioned with social media, it's never as simple as eyeballs = cash, so a degree of caution makes sense.

But where is the harm in also uploading the short videos that populate the F1.com video library onto YouTube as well? Research shows there is a generation of internet users - a younger generation, of course - that now use YouTube for everything they do online.

They don't search for things through Google. YouTube is their search engine, even for news and current events. If there's not a video that meets their search criteria, they just look for something else. So if people are using YouTube as an all-encompassing internet portal, why short-change them in the forlorn hope they will find your series-specific website?

In the ever-increasingly-competitive entertainment landscape, somewhere F1 is struggling to keep up as technology gives people more options to fill their free time, discoverability is key.

Your videos appearing dotted around YouTube as people are browsing is the modern-day equivalent of someone finding F1 on TV by chance while channel hopping. As someone who first saw a grand prix as a wide-eyed three-year-old thanks to my Dad flicking through the UK's four channels in the late 1980s, I can see the difficulty in recreating this effect now the world has moved away from a number of TV channels you could count on one hand.

If F1 wants to restrict its videos so they can't be embedded on other websites (Autosport.com included), that's absolutely fine. But limiting its own YouTube offering so heavily, given the way people's online habits have evolved in the last decade, is a huge missed opportunity.

All of the above is just the tip of the iceberg. If Formula 1 wants to create a far wider-ranging online Netflix-style network of video-on-demand and live streaming in the future - as suggested by Eric Boullier to F1 Racing in the summer of 2015 following our fan survey where more than 50% of the 35,000 respondents said they would be open to paying for such a service - it hardly needs to wait for new owners to come through the door with ideas.

MotoGP does this already, and Boullier outlined his own strategy for such a format. He suggested pricing it low ($5 a month) to attract a large-scale audience. His claim that "more than 200million people will pay and that would give you $1billion revenue every month" is a bit optimistic, for one of the most successful versions of this format to date - wrestling behemoth the WWE Network - boasts around 1.5m paid subscribers worldwide at a price double that suggested by Boullier.

But as his ideas show, this is hardly something that requires a knight in shining digital armour to ride in and reveal as a massive hidden secret.

There are plenty of people who already work for F1, or in F1, who have these ideas, so it's not that Liberty Media needs to tell them what to do, it just needs to let them carry out what they already know.