BBC News Channel To Go Online Only?

Fears grow that the BBC News Channel could become online only

An article in today's Independent raises the possibility that the BBC is considering moving the news channel to an online only service, much like BBC Three will be, in order to make savings as part of DQF.

The artificial says that nothing is planned as yet, but that a £20m needs to be cut from the BBC News budget and that whilst not merging, BBC News and BBC World news need to get "much closer" to save further money..

Interesting, but then would it matter if the channel was online only? Other than Banks and Hotels who has it on 24 hours a day? Who couldn't just catch up online, but then why view a channel when you can read the articles, and could BBC News go the way of ITV and lose the channel entirely in 5, 10 years?

They could shave £20million from the budget by not sending reporters to be on location at every single trivial little story.

Today they've had a truck and reporter at the school where a teacher was stabbed. There is nothing new to report, there hasn't been all day, so they've been tediously reading out the book of condolences.

They'd save money if they just reported the news from the studio. Being there adds nothing.

This will never happen.

Ditto, with Newsroom. BBC News is my favourite news channel.

I don't understand the comparison to BBC Three. BBC Three's new online presence will be as an iPlayer brand of a limited arrange of on demand programming. The BBC News Channel really is the very definition of a linear TV channel - it doesn't produce stand alone content, particularly, but rather a never-ending news bulletin.

If you remove that from actual televisions, you kill the service in a matter of months (which, again, might well be the aim here. If so, this is a beyond cowardly way of reducing services, might I add.). You'd reduce the budget my about £15m, if memory of BBC Three's actual transmission costs serves me right. You then, surely, would make the remaining ~£75m poor value for money based on the notion that anyone who goes on the BBC News website, or open the BBC News app, they will have access to the reporting, analysis and (crucially) video reports immediately - and won't have a need to watch the channel.

That said, there must be better ways of integrating BBC World News and the News Channel? I wonder if lengthening the simulcasts from 11pm onwards on weekdays and maybe even earlier on weekends might be one avenue? As would pooling (and therefore reducing) all recorded progamming, so that 'Meet the Author' type programmes would become funded (or joint-funded) by WN?

I think its more likely to get axed completely than moved online.

Surely it wouldn't be saving a huge amount making online, it would save much more to merge it with BBC World News or similar.

Impossible. Merging operations with BBC WN is more likely but still difficult. A viewer outside of the UK wouldn't care about half of the stories on News 24.

I don't understand the general need for 2 presenters to anchor at once. Savings could be made if they just kept the bulletins to a single presenter, with less live crosses to reporters rehashing old information.

I'd say there's more chance of the news channel being scrapped entirely than just going online. Putting it online only would effectively kill it off anyway as the amount of people who watch tv live online is still minimal compared to tv. Personally I want to see the news channel continue and prosper. It's a vital service especially when major events are taking place. Scrapping it leaves us with no real alternative other than Sky News, we need a choice to make sure we are not getting fed a biased view.

It's a shame you're not DG of the beeb as what you say makes much more sense!

What is an artificial?

A typo