Follow the money

Here's the key footnote about the decision to move BBC3 to an online channel only.

This proposal, if approved by the Trust, will save over £50 million a year. The reported service licence content spend for BBC Three in 2012/13 was £89.7m. However, without Olympics funding and after taking out DQF savings we project the service licence content spend of BBC Three in 2015/16 to be around £75m. The content costs we know we can save are over £50m, of which we are reinvesting £30m into drama on BBC One. The rest will go support our ambitions on the new iPlayer, including BBC Three online. We’re now going to work on the detail of the new service which will deliver further savings. We’ll set out full detail in the summer when we put our proposal to the Trust.

This has the smell of a paragraph written more in strategy and PR than finance. What I take from it is that spending on tv programming specifically aimed at 16 to 34 year olds will be reduced from a planned £75m in 2015/16 to £25m. There'll be marginal cross-subsidy if BBC3 long-form online content is, as promised given an airing on BBC1 and BBC2. There's no claim of a saving in distribution or support and infrastructure - but a chilling note that "further savings" will be delivered. 

£50m found for 2015/16; another £50m to find.