Mike Joy says Fox thinks they can show 20% more green flag racing this year

Work in television, and he's not joking.

The thing in producing and directing live events is that you have an outline in advance, a format, of what your broadcast is going to look like. Segments. # of Breaks. Any sponsored elements, contests, giveaways, etc and where those occur in the overall show. They have a fairly coherent idea of what the broadcast itself is going to look like before they do it, except for the detail of the race itself.

As races were held in 2016, you knew you were going to have, pure example: 160 Laps of racing at Pocono, plus pre-race, warm-up laps, post-race festivities, and the possibility of an overtime segment.

For a race: In general, the segments of a race that casual and serious interested in are the starting laps of a race, and the closing 10% of a race. So those air without any interruptions. And from there, as a producer and working with your crew, you figure out the ebb and flow of a broadcast, being mindful of sponsored elements that will occur at certain points, and you try, genuinely try, to get breaks in during the points of least action. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And cautions aren't necessarily the best time, as the length of cautions isn't fixed (will this be a 3 lap caution vs. a 10 lap ordeal) AND it gives you time to "reset", and update viewers on the stories of the race, work in statistics, offer technical info, show replays, the works.

Stick and ball sports are easier. You have fixed intervals and set gaps between them. NHL? 3 20 minute periods, with 15 minute intermissions in between. Men's College Basketball? Two 20 minute halves, with set media timeouts at the first dead ball after 16:00/12:00/8:00/4:00. Baseball's the easiest: Nine distinct innings, with a break and reset after each half-inning.

With the switch to a segment/main system for 2017, the production format for NASCAR will likely start to resemble soccer a lot more. Ever watch a soccer game broadcast in the US? 45 minutes of nearly continuous action, only coming to a complete break or stepping away if there's a major stoppage in play (severe weather, etc) then several commercial breaks during the intermission as well as a couple of breaks in the post-game.

With the change to segments, expect there to be several commercial breaks in short succession during each intermission, with coverage returning for pit stops, a segment for analysis and a story reset, and then racing resuming. Multiple, likely 4-5 breaks in each of the two stopdowns depending on how long. (NBA coverage typically has 4-5 of breaks during halftime).

I'm looking at a race format for a race from 2014 for example, which had 28 break positions starting the clock from the end of the pre-race coverage up to the end of their allotted timeslot (extra breaks are allotted if race coverage spills over). Lemme repeat this: [b] The number of commercial breaks in a race broadcast is fixed, set in advance prior to the day of the race and almost never deviates from this number except in extreme circumstances [/b]. The only deviation from this is bonus breaks if race coverage overruns it's time slot. The number of these bonus breaks is set in advance.

If you can knock out eight breaks out of 28 in two relatively concise periods of time (the two intermissions), plus the breaks for a pre-race? You're suddenly looking at only having to break away from the race itself, from laps that count, 18 times in a 400 mile race instead of 26. . Now, based on Mike Joy's 20% number, I'm going to assume that my estimates were a bit liberal, but the point stands that the more breaks you can cram into those stopdowns, the fewer times you have to interrupt the race itself.

And functionally, when you're spending on average 20 minutes every 60 in commercial already, you can't really add very much advertising time to the format without greatly exacerbating the speed of viewers running away from broadcast and cable TV and cutting the cord.

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