March 2015 to present

Around the same time as the revamped Official F1 website was launched, FOM started uploading videos to its YouTube channel, starting with the first:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAm9FLvilzk

Initially these were simply cut-down versions of videos already on the Official F1 website – the intention being that you’d visit the F1 website, find the corresponding video on there, and watch the full thing. For example, here is the full-length version of the above video: https://www.formula1.com/en/video/2015/3/Rule_changes_in_Formula_1_for_2015_season.html

This continued for a few weeks, until gradually FOM were simply uploading the same video (with modifications & overlays promoting FOM’s other social media accounts) to YouTube as they were on the website. This has ultimately continued to the present day, with only a small number of videos not ending up being cross-posted to both YouTube & the F1 website. For example, clips featuring live commentary (from Sky) were typically not cross-posted to YouTube until after the season in question was over (i.e. clips featuring live commentary from 2016 were not uploaded until 2017). This delay appears to have ended in 2017, with videos being uploaded featuring commentary, while the current season is in progress. Another video category that was initially not cross-posted to the F1 website until the near the end of the 2017 season were the “Race Edit/Director’s Cut” music videos for each round. As of now, only the Director’s cuts from the final 3 rounds of the 2017 season have been cross-posted to YouTube.

March 2017

In March 2017, the quality of the uploaded videos increased from 720p to 1080p, with newly uploaded videos having their frame-rate increased to 50p – in order to more accurately reflect how the content was shot – this was apparently in response to a highly-liked fan comment on one of the videos, asking for a higher-frame-rate to be used. Despite this however, the videos uploaded to the Official F1 website remained at 1080p25.