Delivering Quality First

Spotted this in the full document:



Not sure how they propose to do this without leaving parts of England without proper regional news coverage on digital satellite. My guess is services like Look North Hull and the South Today Oxford opt-out would disappear on digital satellite, but what replaces them in the areas affected would largely be irrelevant for viewers in those areas.

Also spotted, HD versions of BBC One Scotland, BBC One Wales and BBC One Northern Ireland to be launched by the end of 2012. BBC HD to be replaced with BBC Two HD, but no HD versions of the BBC Two national variants as it is not thought to be good value for money or affordable. BBC Two national variants have also been put on a long-term review, but will be maintained until at least 2015.

A few more bits from BBC News' updated article...
"There will be fewer chat shows and panel shows on BBC Two"
...and...
"There will be reductions in medium wave transmissions for local radio in England where coverage replicates FM. There will also be no re-investment in Long Wave, which will lead to the end of Radio 4 on LW in the long term. "

So Mock the week and Buzzcocks could disappear to keep QI afloat.

I suppose the thinking is that BBC1 SD will always be available via freeview (which should in theory be build into a sizeable number of TVs with a sky box attached).

Not too dissimilar to when digital first started up and there would be a few programme variations between analogue and digital on BBC1/2. It's like Freeview will become the new analogue in that respect.

Apart from leaving West London there's no real surprises I n today's announcements and considering some of the proposals that were reported it could have been a lot worse

The White City move is odd, they've spent 10 years building a media village there and are now ditching it. I wonder what Red Bee think of that


That's really just a continuation of a process that's been going on, slowly, for 20 years and perhaps should have been completed years ago. The loss of Radio 4 Long Wave shouldn't be that much of an issue as it was, the ex-pats that campaigned to keep it will all have satellite and internet radio to use. It'll be interesting to see how that affects things like emergency broadcasting and Economy 7 switching

Doesn't moving CBBC away from BBC1 (which is mostly repeats anyway) open up a new area to fill? Presumably the BBC2 daytime stuff at that time simply moves over, but then that doesn't save money, does it?

BBC Two HD will be an odd one as it will mean HD from 3/4/CBBC/CBeebies won't get aired at all. There's the argument that there will be far more 3/4 repeats on 1/2 but that won't cover everything, and it looks like CBBC and CBeebies could be leaving 1 and 2 entirely so it wouldn't cover them.

Well, it's still unclear where the extra satellite bandwidth will come from to provide BBC 1 HD Wa/Sc/NI ?
Remember, just last week the Beeb reduced its Astra transponder count by one as well !

Small English regions may well be become unsustainable on satellite, though switching all BBC D-Sat transmission to DVB-S2 would help (can't be considered in the short or medium term , because it would render the BBC unviewable on millions of older Sky boxes)

Presumably it does because there won't be 2 sets of CBBC programmes running at the same time.

I can kind of see the logic, what's the population of a region like the South East or Oxford? Is it really worth having a whole satellite channel just for a few hundred thousand people?

So ch6 would.only be freebies then?

No, that's not really a wider region. I assume it means, for example: one for the north, one for the midlands, etc

The Politics Show going will save the regions some money too. I suspect the loss of PS and reduction in Inside Out has helped local radio and TV news quite a bit