The impoverished BBC - which can barely afford a pot to piss in, if you believe all its tales of woe - has announced its intention to close several television and radio channels.
The Government recently announced that the £159 TV licence fee will be frozen for the next two years, at a cost of around £285m to the BBC.
BBC Director General Tim Davie announced the Corporation's latest plan to "makes ends meet".
Speaking on Thursday, Davie said: "What we are laying out today is a £500m plan for the next few years.
"This is made up of two things: £200m a year of cuts which are necessitated by the two-year licence fee freeze. This represents the majority of our £285m a year challenge by 2027/28. £50m of this £200m is already baked into our current budgets. The rest is delivered by stopping things and running the organisation better where we can.
"Then there’s a further £300m a year which is about moving money around the organisation and delivering additional commercial income. This means that we are not just cutting money everywhere but making choices where to invest."
Savings will be made by implementing the following changes:
- The merger of the BBC News Channel and BBC World News, into a single news channel delivering both UK and international news;
- The merger of BBC regional newsrooms and programmes:
- two versions of BBC Look East - one broadcast from Cambridge, the other from Norwich - will be merged into a single programme from Norwich by the end of 2022;
- two versions of BBC South Today - one broadcast from Oxford, the other from Southampton - will be merged into a single programme from Southampton by the end of 2022;
- The removal of BBC Four as a linear channel, with on-demand content being shifted to the BBC iPlayer;
- Moving several BBC World Service foreign-language programmes to an online only format;
- The closure of childrens' channel CBBC;
- The closure of BBC Radio 4 Extra;
- The removal of BBC Radio 4 long wave, but other methods of output will be retained;
- BBC Local Radio content being syndicated over a larger number of stations.
The Corporation expects the changes to result in 1,000 redundancies over the next few years.
With viewers abandoning traditional linear TV programmes in their droves Davie pledged to build a "digital first" BBC by "evolving faster" and "embracing changes" in the market.
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2 comments:
Too little the BBC needs to die ASAP and by no later than December 2027. The amount of new content it shows can be counted on one finger compared to the repeats that need a couple of bodies to count them on.
So, the BBC is setting out its stall and laying the battle ground ahead of the Charter negotiations.
Does it a close the TV channel whose offering can be found elsewhere, no it chooses the unique BBC4
How about one of its many many radio stations that are copied by other commercial broadcasters, again no, it selects the unique 4Extra.
Closing CBBC will lead to a rumpus in Parliament as nobody else makes kids telly and they probably hoping for vocal protests and petitioning by older people in support of BBC4 and 4Extra.
Will they be moving their taxpayer fumded archive behimd a commercial paywall if the licence goes?
Why do they despise the people who still fund them?
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