Not many people watch the “early start” of Formula 1 in Las Vegas at 5 a.m.: RTL, Sky, and ServusTV really did poorly at this year’s Grand Prix.
For Formula 1 owner Liberty Media, the Grand Prix in Las Vegas is a status symbol. But for Formula 1’s TV partners in Germany and Austria, the race on the Strip Circuit is a fiasco: in 2025, the ratings were the worst ever in the event’s three-year history.
Free-to-air broadcaster RTL suffered the biggest slump: only 370,000 viewers watched the live broadcast on Sunday morning from 5 a.m. – a historic low for RTL. Since 2021, the station has only failed to reach the one million mark once: in 2024 at the US Grand Prix in Austin with 760,000 viewers. Las Vegas 2025 broke this negative record.
Because RTL only broadcasts part-time on free-to-air TV and only shows selected races, it is difficult to compare it with other Grands Prix. However, in spring 2025, the broadcaster reached 1.13 million viewers for the race in China, which started at 8 a.m. – its second-worst performance to date after Austin 2024.
The only positive for RTL in Las Vegas was its market share of 15 percent, which is just above the season average so far. RTL has only achieved better figures this year for Shanghai (18.1 percent) and Barcelona (15.8 percent).
Negative record also for pay-TV channel Sky
Pay-TV broadcaster Sky also performed poorly in Las Vegas, but slumped less significantly than RTL: 293,000 viewers watched the television coverage on Sky – around 30,000 fewer than the previous low point of the season at the season opener in Australia with 321,000 viewers.
However, Las Vegas has never been a ratings hit for Sky: 310,000 viewers watched the premiere in 2023, compared to 328,000 last year. With an additional 60,000 streaming customers, Sky still managed to attract a total audience of 353,000 for its live broadcast of the race.
The only ray of hope, as with RTL, was the comparatively large market share of 11.9 percent, which, however, as with RTL, was mainly due to the early start time of 5 a.m.
ServusTV also crashes
The picture is similar in Austria: ServusTV also took a nosedive, recording its lowest ratings of the year, with only 178,000 viewers watching the Las Vegas Grand Prix on the Red Bull channel. In 2023, 348,000 viewers had watched the race live on ServusTV. ServusTV had performed even worse last year during the opening race in Australia: At that time, only 128,000 viewers tuned in. The only time there were fewer viewers was in 2021 at the Austrian Grand Prix (112,000), when ServusTV and ORF reported on their Formula 1 home race in parallel. In the meantime, the Spielberg broadcast switches back and forth on an annual basis.
As with RTL and Sky in Germany, ServusTV’s market share in Austria was high due to the early broadcast: around 48 percent of television viewers watched the race live. 120,000 viewers also watched the repeat a few hours later.
Which channels are broadcasting the sprint and Grand Prix in Qatar?
In Germany, the penultimate race weekend of the 2025 Formula 1 season can only be seen live in its entirety on Sky. RTL will only broadcast the sprint live on Saturday, but on its pay platform RTL+. In Switzerland, SRF will show all the important events live as usual, while in Austria, the public broadcaster ORF will take over for the last time this year.
