to pay-TV in UK in 2012 when Sky screened all races live

Shock new figures obtained by the Mail on Sunday show that Formula One suffered a global drop in TV viewing figures last year, including an alarming loss of more than five per cent in Britain - despite Britain’s Lewis Hamilton securing the world title in a last-race showdown.

The revelation is the latest hard evidence that sports rights holders who opt for bigger paydays from subscription TV operators are doing so at the expense of wider, mainstream audiences for their sport.

The fall in F1 numbers, disclosed by F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone in the sport’s annual broadcast report, yet to be made public, showed that worldwide audiences fell by 5.6 per cent to 425 million different fans tuning in across the season from 450 million previously.

Lewis Hamilton is pictured celebrating his Formula One title triumph at the season-ending race in Abu Dhabi

The British star saw off the challenge from his Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg to claim his second title

Ecclestone attributes the decline to ‘the move [F1] has towards Pay-TV in several markets over the last three seasons.’ This includes in Britain, where year-on-year audiences were down 5.2 per cent.

Golf fans are reeling this weekend at the news that the BBC will lose the live rights to show The Open - the oldest and most prestigious tournament in the world - after this summer’s event at St Andrews.

Sky Sports will pay £10m-a-year for the UK live rights, up from the BBC’s £7m a year, and the BBC’s 59-year TV ‘ownership’ of the event will end, as will live access to millions who do not have pay-TV.

F1 switched to pay-TV in the UK in 2012 when Sky Sports began broadcasting all of the races live while the BBC now only shows half of them. The move boosted F1’s UK broadcast income by 110 per cent to £65 million - but at the cost of a wider audience.

Major sports rights owners including the England & Wales Cricket Board and The All England Club have wrestled in recent times with the dilemma of more TV income at the cost of a much bigger free-to-air audience.

Rosberg is pictured missing the chicane at the Italian Grand Prix which handed victory to rival Hamilton

The Mercedes pair collide at the Belgian Grand Prix in one of many flashpoints of an enthralling campaign

That pair have taken contrasting approaches, the ECB effectively selling most live cricket to Sky until 2019, although incoming chairman Colin Graves is desperate to find a way to get live matches back onto free TV. The AEC have resisted approaches to sell Wimbledon tennis to Sky, with a BBC contract in place until 2017, although that decision is under constant review.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that any slim hopes of live Premier League games being shown on free-to-air TV for the first time have also been dashed. ITV have rejected the possibility of making any bid to screen live Premier League games from 2016-17 because the only theoretically affordable package within their reach is likely to be comprised of low-interest games and ‘small’ teams.

The country’s biggest free-to-air commercial broadcaster considered the tender document offering matches for the three-year period from 2016-17 to 2018-19 open-minded about the prospect of becoming the first UK channel to provide regular PL games free to fans.

After losing the rights to the Champions League from next season to BT Sport, and deciding not even to bid for Premier League highlights for 2016-19 because they made ‘no commercial sense’, their only other option to show any live club football was a bid for the Premier League rights.

Chelsea players celebrate during their draw against Manchester City on Saturday evening. ITV have rejected the possibility of making any bid to screen live Premier League games from 2016-17

Seven packages of games per season for 2016-19 are up for auction, with a first bid deadline of Friday. Five packages have 28 games and two have 14 games, with one of those apparently ripe for an ITV bid - made up of Saturday early evening games.

Sky currently have five packages of games and BT Sport have two and that pair will be key bidders again, with a growing expectation that US-based Discovery Communications (owners of EuroSport) and Qatar-owned beIN Sports will also enter the fray.

But just as ITV decided not even to bother to go up against the BBC for the highlights, aka the ‘Match of the Day rights’, retained by the BBC for £204m for 2016-19, they saw no viable way to make a Saturday evening slot of live games work commercially. That package has no first-choice games and mostly fourth-choice and fifth-choice games.

Manchester United and Liverpool have long been the biggest draws for televised football in the UK, with Chelsea and Arsenal next most popular and Manchester City in recent times coming up behind them. The appetite among a general mainstream audience for other clubs drops sharply, and without the prospect of consistent big-name teams and the audience and advertising revenues they would bring, ITV saw any bid as too risky.