The streaming outage F1 cannot diagnose

If the customer is always right, then Formula 1 got itself into a very tricky place last weekend as some of its most committed fans were badly let down.

Just two laps into the Azerbaijan Grand Prix - which looked set to be a thriller on the back of an incident-packed build-up - the official F1 TV live streaming service crashed. As fans worldwide desperately refreshed their web pages so they could follow the action, they were left facing a spinning 'wheel of death' as the stream froze.

It took until around lap 36 for the service to resume. By then, Charles Leclerc's impressive charge through the field had been missed and a lot of the intrigue over whether Mercedes or Ferrari would have the upper hand had been lost.

Add those 34 laps of action to all the outages that also hit F1 TV in qualifying and the weekend proved a frustrating one all round.

It's little wonder that fans took to social media to vent their frustrations. Multiple tweets showed blank screens or the spinning reboot wheel, and many vowed to cancel their subscriptions.

#F1tv is such a worthless product again. pic.twitter.com/H1agRBvkmc

— Cristian Perton (@cristianperton) April 28, 2019

F1's official help channel did apologise almost immediately, and promised that engineers were looking into the matter. But that was little consolation for the thousands of fans who had settled down to watch a grand prix and instead were left facing a blank screen.

So what went wrong? The usual explanation when live streaming services crash is that too many people logged on at the same time, causing system overload.

Live streaming of programmes, especially popular ones such as an F1 race, is a complicated business. It involves dealing with a huge number of concurrent users trying to access the same page or stream. Often what happens is that organisations underestimate just how popular certain broadcasts will be, and when that happens things trip up.

One notorious example, from 2014, was when US network HBO promised a new era for its customers by offering live streaming of the latest episodes of Game of Thrones. But its HBO Go service stumbled when too many viewers tuned in. The system crashed frequently, people missed episodes and unhappy viewers took to social media to vent their frustrations. Sound familiar?

Knowing that it could not afford repeat problems for subsequent series of Game of Thrones, HBO turned to IT specialists from Major League Baseball.

Major League Baseball Advanced Media (or BAM as it's known), which had started life creating websites for teams and clubs and had mastered the sport's streaming offerings, was drafted in to help.

F1's job is also made more challenging because its offering is especially complex

BAM did the job. A year later HBO's season-five premiere of Game of Thrones ran trouble-free, and the company, now rebranded as BAMTech, has gone on to bigger and better things under the majority ownership of Disney.

But it's understood that the F1 streaming issue in Baku was not caused by a system overload like this. Although qualifying and the race took place at times that were relatively normal to a European audience after the flyaways in Australia, Bahrain and China - so there would likely have been more potential viewers - the number of people trying to access the service was actually not dramatically different.

It seems that something else in the system went wrong, and right now there is no definitive answer on the issue. The very same system that had coped for the opening three grands prix just suddenly broke down.

Engineers are still trying to work out where things fell over in the network of inter-connected organisations that produces the service. Pinpointing the answer is like finding a needle in a haystack - modern life is full of stories about how a seemingly random event in one place can trigger a massive tech meltdown elsewhere.

The British Airways IT crash of 2017 that affected 75,000 passengers was alleged to have been caused by a technician turning off a power system which, when reconnected, caused a surge that damaged company servers.

F1's job is also made more challenging because its offering is especially complex. It's not just one channel of live coverage that's streamed - there are multi-language options, a pitlane channel, a data tracker and live onboard cameras from every car. One glitch in the system is enough to bring it all down.

Problems with F1 TV were common in its inaugural season last year, but they were put down to the technology being so new and the inevitable teething problems. Fans were patient and ready to give F1 a bit more time to get it right.

Indeed, last winter, F1 chairman Chase Carey raised a few eyebrows when he suggested that, despite charging fans for the service, he viewed year one as beta testing.

"It's a multi-year project to get it where we believe it can get to," Carey said during one of Liberty Media's investor calls. "But I guess I'd say this year ended up being almost a beta project. We didn't launch it at the beginning of the season and, for a sport like ours to really achieve our potential, it's a season buy, more than a [race-by-race] buy."

At the start of the year, it looked like F1 TV had made progress from the season-one problems. According to F1 TV regulars, until Baku the system had been mostly troublefree. Yes, there had been some glitches, such as an F2 race being broadcast only with sound, but there had been nothing like the crash that wiped out most of the Baku coverage.

When F1 has aimed its service at subscribers the minimum expected is that it works for the main event

It's only to be expected that fans feel a bit short-changed at the moment. Yes, F1 deserves some praise for responding quickly with refunds, but it must still be galling that fans have been robbed of the moments they live for - watching live coverage of their favourite sport.

The situation is not helped by it being a subscription service. Were F1 TV a free service that was going through beta testing, there would be less justification for dramatic complaints if things went wrong. After all, that's the point of testing.

But when F1 has aimed the service at subscribers who have paid good money to follow the championship, the minimum expected is that it works for the main event.

Beyond customers not getting what they paid for, it's now even more important to make sure the service works, with so many countries having F1 behind the paywall. If F1 TV goes down, then fans are left watching nothing - or chasing an illegal pirate stream.

Getting to the bottom of what went wrong in Baku is essential, and it's as important for fans as it is for F1's bosses. From the fans' perspective, they need to know that they can trust F1's OTT offering.

When the system works, it can be fantastic. Being able to watch live onboard footage of your favourite driver and listen to their radio (or go back later to relive the controversial moments) is priceless for the committed fan.

But when it goes wrong, as it did in Baku, it's as useless as a broken down car to a racing driver.