Sail GP World Championship

SailGP is adrenaline-fueled racing as rival teams go head-to-head in iconic venues across the globe for a winner-takes-all prize. The series blends sheer emotion, state-of-the-art technology and incredible drama, as elite athletes fly cutting-edge wingsailed catamarans in thrilling close-to-shore races.

Venues are global and the racing is spectacular with the one design F50 boat reaching top speeds of up to 99 kilometres per hour making for very dramatic and often unpredictable racing. Teams represent their countries, allowing a partisan following as fans get behind the flags of Australia, The USA, France, Spain and Great Britain among the nine competing teams.

Sailing has traditionally been one of the harder sports to capture well on TV. But Sail GP created a fleet format where teams race against each other with the fastest progressing to a winner takes all final in each location. Races only last 15 minutes and there is no room for error. This quick-fire action has proved to be an easier entry point for an audience who might be new to the sport, and our on-going work on athlete characterisation, rivalries, explanation of tactics and performance is essential to growing new fan engagement.

Output is truly global with Live race versions produced in English, French and Spanish in an eleven-event series. Live and Non-Live programmes are distributed to 45 broadcasters and online platforms including Sky Sports, CBS, Sky NZ, Canal + and many more.

The broadcast remote production has also been market leading. All live shows are mastered live by the Aurora production team out of Timeline’s gallery in Ealing, dramatically reducing our TV footprint on site. The on water technical inventory includes remotely operated agile on-board cameras and team radio, truly bringing the audience directly into the heart of the action. Land cameras and gyro-stabilised on water chase boats provide essential coverage and our Helicopter overview, also from production partner Amis, provides both context and geography of the race track. This allows the audience, sailing and non-sailing alike to easily follow the unfolding action.

The graphics package for SailGP is similarly best-in-class. LiveLineFX is SailGP’s owned in-house broadcast graphics package, which powers the storytelling of elite-level sailing. It enhances the viewers understanding of the racing by providing key graphical elements, enabling the sport to be understood and accessible to all fans - regardless of sailing knowledge.

• Total broadcast audience of 823.4 million viewers
• 700 hours of broadcast coverage per race across 186 territories globally.
• 97 million digital views
• Live streams of SailGP events across the series’ digital platforms – on YouTube and Facebook – accumulated 1.16 million views.
• The female audience increased in season two and viewers in the 18 to 34 age category was up 21 per cent.