Well each one would have a budget of £5m by that estimate. It's possible, but
only if that included satellite and internet distribution.
Terrestrial just wouldn't be possible with the current transmitter network.
________________________________
From: owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk
[mailto:owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk] On Behalf Of Brian Butterworth
Sent: 18 June 2009 10:49
To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk
Subject: Re: [backstage] The Final Digital Britain report
The think I have the most of an issue with is the funding of a regional
news programme for ITV.
If you are going to spend £150m (say) of BBC money, it would be better
to break up the BBC regional news service into a network of BBC local news
channels.
For a start it would make sense to supplement BBC London with BBC
Birmingham and BBC Manchester. This would mean BBC West Midlands and BBC North
West becomes a "county" service.
The BBC Scotland service could be split into an urban "central belt"
service for Edinburgh and Glasgow and a "highland and islands" service (cf.
"Grampian region")
The BBC North West service could split into three, one for "Tyne", one
for "Tees" and one for "Cumbria".
BBC North could be BBC West Yorkshire (Leeds, Bradford etc), BBC South
Yorkshire (Sheffield) and BBC North Yorkshire (another "county" service).
The BBC South region could split as Meridian did, with one for the
Hampshire end and another for Sussex.
And so on. There are 60.9 million people in the UK, so 30 regional
news channels serving a population of about 2 million each would be "local"
news.
It would CLEARLY be better for there to be ONE news programme with
LOCAL news for everyone, than a choice of TWO news programmes that are REGIONAL.
Any analysis would show that people would benefit more for news of a
more local nature, than a choice of two lots of news that will be about
somewhere that is not local.
The idea of preserving regional news on ITV is nostalgia and not an
analysis of what would benefit the public.
You could clearly get 30 x BBC Local News 24-hour channels from £150m a
year, couldn't you?
2009/6/16 Ian Forrester <ian.forres...@bbc.co.uk>
The Final Digital Britain Report
http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/broadcasting/6216.aspx
So what do people think? Time to leave the country or dig a
hole and stick our heads into it?
Cheers,
Ian Forrester
This e-mail is: []secret; []private; [x]public
Senior Producer, BBC Backstage, BBC R&D
Room 1044, BBC Manchester BH, Oxford Road, M60 1SJ
email: ian.forres...@bbc.co.uk
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Brian Butterworth
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web: http://www.ukfree.tv - independent digital television and
switchover advice, since 2002
