Still a station....

There's detail to await, but it looks like the BBC is giving the Asian Network another chance, albeit on a much reduced budget.  That's the essence of the tweets coming in from the conference call to all staff on the station.  The Executive move in theory needs Trust backing, but that's not going to be a problem. The Trust is still, Lyons-stylee, reviewing the station's output.

The BBC Asian Network was launched as a national station on DAB in October 2002, as part of Jenny Abramsky's suite of digital offerings - 1Xtra, 5Live Sports Extra, 6Music and BBC Radio 7 (to be 4Extra from next month).  It's had more than a few make-overs in eight and a bit years.  First Jenny called in Tim Gardam from Oxford to review the output, who rather inevitably decided it wasn't "newsy" enough - there followed substantial investment.   Then Bob Shennan, as Controller 5Live was asked to mind the shop - and it became more chatty again.  Most recently, it's been under the aegis of Andy Parfitt, Controller, Radio 1 and 1Xtra - and we've seen more promotion of the music output.  Below is a chart of the station's reach trend, borrowed from the excellent MediaUK site.

In the most recent BBC Annual Report, the Asian Network comes out as the most expensive Audio & Music network, at 8.5p per listener hour.  However, there are other comparisons to be made:

BBC Online costs 8.9p per user reached
BBC Parliament costs 14p per viewer hour
BBC nan Gaidheal costs 16.7p per listener hour
BBC Radio Cymru costs 13.7p per listener hour
BBC Four costs 14p per viewer hour
BBC Alba costs 20.6p per viewer hour

Let's see where these other services end up in the budget table for 2010/11.