Killing SPEED Could Make Fox $1 Billion
Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today we've got reports from Petrolicious, Wired, and Car And Driver.
Did the Speed Channel Have to Die? We Examine the Economics – Car And Driver
An exceptionally smart piece from C/D on the death of SPEED.
The driving force to create Fox Sports 1 (FS1) from the ashes of Speed was "subscriber revenue." Sports channels like FS1 can be big moneymakers. In 2012, Speed was reportedly collected $0.22 per month per subscriber, while ESPN was commanding $5.04 per month, according to SNL Kagan. FS1 is projected to charge $0.80 per month against 90 million subscribers (ESPN has 100 million). Forecasting out several years, this is the difference between Speed garnering $350 million from subscribers to FS1 amassing $1 billion from the same people, through rebranding and simply mixing up the programming. (For a more in-depth look at the numbers, check out the charts at the bottom of this story.)
See How Boeing Is Piecing Together Its New Stretch Dreamliner – Wired:Autopia
A great photo gallery from Wired.
Construction has yet to begin on the 787-10, but we had a chance to visit the Dreamliner factory north of Seattle while the new 787-9 was being built earlier this summer. The airplane shares the same composite design and efficiency of its smaller sibling, including the same wing, though they are strengthened to handle the additional weight.
PEEK INTO A MILLE MIGLIA GARAGE – Petrolicious
Watch the video above, then read this article.
As we saw in today's Petrolicious video, Italian Roberto Vesco is quite the fan of the Mille Miglia. The Fiat featured in today's video has been raced in the Mille Miglia several times, and one year it even won at the hand of Vesco's son. Roberto Vesco is also quite the collector: over the course of 35 years, he has found and accumulated books, magazines, rare steering wheels, mechanical counters, chronometers, mufflers, and engines. Below are some of our favorite magazine and brochure covers from the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, many of which are related to the Mille Miglia and all of which we found in Vesco's garage.
Photo Credit: Wired, Getty Images