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WTCR to drop Facebook livestream after 'disappointing experiment'

World Touring Car Cup races will not be shown on Facebook in 2019 after the series' "experiment" with live streaming last year proved a "huge disappointment"

The series showed the majority of practice sessions and all first qualifying sessions and first races on its official Facebook page at every round in 2018.

But viewership figures did not meet WTCR promoter Eurosport Events' expectations and the series' live streaming of races has been dropped after just one year.

WTCR will continue to stream practice and qualifying sessions on Facebook, but all three races at each event will now been shown through traditional linear TV transmissions on Eurosport.

"Frankly, the live Facebook transmission was a huge disappointment," said Eurosport Events head Francois Ribeiro.

"It's very unknown. It's very difficult, because within social media there is media and Facebook is a medium.

"But what kind of media it is, and how it works for live sport broadcasts, the best way to understand how it works is to experiment.

"I heard so many things - 'Francois, if you put WTCR live [on Facebook] you're going to have millions of viewers'.

"We have done very creative stuff [with] our drivers and ask them to be actors and we will keep pushing this next year.

"But the truth is the live broadcast on Facebook was nowhere near what I was expecting, way below. So I've decided to stop this.

"I cannot explain [to] teams, sponsors, manufacturers why I would have to penalise them [with low viewer numbers for one race].

"So we will keep using social media for the narrative and the storytelling of the championship, but not for live broadcasts of races.

"It's not strong enough to put this on TV, actually."

Ribeiro said he has tasked WTCR's production team with devising additional material that can be used to extend WTCR's programming runtime this year.

"We did a brainstorm with our TV producer and I said, 'look, maybe we should do a bit longer'," added Ribeiro.

"Start a bit before and for instance we select one team per event and we stay with that team and we open radio communication with an engineer and ask the team manager to explain before the event what will be the sequence during the qualifying session.

"[Then] stay live after the chequered flag to debrief with that engineer, team principal or drivers so that immediately we can explain to viewers what happened - what went right, what went wrong - and give better keys of understanding.

"How do you explain to the viewers how a team is organised to face a qualifying session?

"It's everything in the weekend, the qualifying session, and yet I think we are very poor in our narrative to explain how a team is organised, how you approach a qualifying session and how a team organises itself."

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