BBC axe Crimewatch

Casualty/Holby would benefit from being reduced to around 25 episodes per year each, but then wouldn't be as cost effective as they are now, even if it means a degradation in the quality of the shows as they are currently.

EastEnders is another which has suffered from having too many episodes, but the Elstree battery farm continues.

Short episodes plus a much-vaunted "podcasting trend" plus a storyline that's had them all over the news hasn't stopped The Archers losing listeners over the last couple of years.

12-24 year olds are the most likely to binge watch, but episodes need to be 15 minutes? Sounds more than a bit silly to me.



That list is the TV Forum equivalent of clickbait - the News on BBC One and Songs of Praise won't be going in the next 5 years under any circumstances (as much as I'd celebrate the loss of the latter). The only truly dying programme out of those is Blue Peter; the rest could easily be reformatted (especially Panorama - there's no need for it to be a regular weekly strand), or are extremely unlikely to decline so much in 5 years

Why would you celebrate the end of Songs of Praise?

He probably doesn’t have much time for religion. He probably doesn’t like the idea of the license fee funding such a programme in this day and age and he would like to see a time in our society when there is no need for such a broadcast.

News at 10 on BBC One is such an odd relic, like CBBC on BBC One. It's from a time when we only had 2 channels.

I imagine not having it in the schedule would give the channel much more flexibility in what it could show and when.

Just do not see the point of it when you can just flick over to the news channel when you want a news update, at practically any time of day.

I'd sooner they drop things the news on BBC1 than true PSB stuff not catered for elsewhere.

I think that’s ridiculous really. If you suddenly got rid of the News at 10pm it doesn’t mean everyone who wants to watch the News at 10pm is going to go to the news channels. There is still value in offering this appointment to view programming and off loading it to just the BBC News Channel would mean it would just get lost within a wallpaper service, losing any importance. It serves a public service value in that it means millions of people who wouldn’t watch the news if they had to search it out do and therefore can continue to make informed decisions which is needed for democracy.

I think if News at 10pm doesn’t fall into public service broadcasting it’s hard to argue anything goes else does.

Everyone can turn over to rolling news any time they want... but they don't.

The big flagship bulletins like those on BBC1 are different to rolling news, they're self contained curated wrap ups of the news of the day.

They get good audiences that they just wouldn't get on the News Channel, and that's not just because people don't watch the channel it's because they're broadcast on a channel with popular programmes. This is what schedulers call hammocking.

Do you think there is going to be a News at 10 on BBC One or ITV for all of time? really?

even if it doesn't go in 5 years, i cannot see it lasting much longer - the next generation of kids are consuming content in a completely different way and it's position in the schedule caters for older audiences.

I also do not accept that moving the news to the news channel will make the news "inaccessible" and have a negative effect on democracy.

The latest figures I can find puts the combined viewing figures of both the ITV and BBC News at around 5m - so less than 10% of the population are watching news at 10pm - I can't imagine that figure going up - looking at the barb figures for 1982, 17 million people watched an episode of itn news - you don't even get that for the x factor results show these days - and if you adjust those figures for population growth over the last 30 odd years, the percentage of people watching linear tv has been deceasing significantly in real terms.

i do find the sentimentality on this forum very endearing

I think the main news bulletins will stay on the main channels for as long as they exist as muti-genre linear channels. That will certainly end at some point, and whether they will still produce a news programme as such I don't know

That sort of audience decline is not down to non linear TV though, it's due to more choice of linear TV.

The ratings for the early evening bulletins - both regional and national are much higher than the 10

Non linear TV is still a fledging medium, despite the trendy meeja chatter about Netflix etc, the vast majority of the population still watch linear channels

Yep - totally agree. Whilst the main linear channels are still achieving ratings of 10m for peak shows, news shows scheduled close to them also rate very highly.

The audience share a main-channel bulletin reaches is still an order of magnitude higher than output on a dedicated news channel.

I suspect whilst multi-genre linear channels remain - news will be part of their output. If anything the 24 hour channels are more at risk from online consumption, as they rate far lower than the bulletins.

The big erosion of the 'main' terrestrials is really the fragmentation of the audience to multichannel linear. OTT and other online stuff is beginning make an impact - but it's still relatively minor.

Very patronising for a person who hasn't got a clue what he is talking about.