Poor old Tim Davie - trying desperately to be a very modern, accessible BBC Director General with a STRATEGY, and yet, in the hunt for change, we get old school salami-slicing.
He says today's announcements represent £200m worth of things that will stop, and moving £300m of money from existing linear output to 'digital first'. His staff, never mind his audiences on tv and radio, have no idea what that means.
The slices: more 'merging' of BBC World and BBC News; a slow death for BBC4 (monthly reach 17.7m), the eventual closure of Radio 4 Extra (latest weekly reach 1.9m, not far off Radio 3), a 2025 end date for CBBC (monthly reach 4m). Around the UK, the end for We Are England; the end of regional news opt-outs from Oxford and Cambridge. TV seems to have come off lightly - 200 fewer hours of new content (last year, BBC4 had around 229 hours of new arts and music content) - total hours of new content on BBC1, BBC2, BBC4, CBBC, CBeebies and BBC Scotland (excluding news) were 32,271 hours.
The end of Radio 4 on longwave, signalled since 2011 when the transmitter valves stopped being made, has probably be accelerated by electricity price rises - it uses 500kw. 5Live will stop using medium-wave, and (as above) 4 Extra comes off DAB.
Orchestras - another try at getting someone else to pay for at least one of them.
Overall, 1,000 posts to close "in the public-funded part of the BBC over the next few years."
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