I’ve double-checked my calendar, and it’s definitely not August, so quite why this weekend saw a plethora of stupid media stories I don’t know.
First of all The Observer had a story suggesting that as a way of moving people over to digital, first BBC2 and then BBC1 would be switched off to encourage digital take-up.
Well that’s not going to happen for a start. I think the lines at the end are the most important:
Ministers realise that turning off the analogue signal before viewers have switched to digital would be political suicide because it would leave millions of voters without TV. But they are desperate to avoid the embarrassment of formally abandoning the 2010 target.
Digital suicide indeed. The 2010 target is simply unachievable. It’s not going to happen. And who’s queuing up for all this freed-up bandwidth just now anyway? The cellular companies don’t seem to be in a rush to use their 3G space, and I guess we must be looking at some kind of 4th generation communications devices.
95% of households being able to receive digital TV is not enough. According to Ofcom, 99.4% of the population can currently receive analogue TV (excluding Five). So that’s 4.4% of the population who receive TV now potentially losing their service. Numerically, that’s around 2.6m people! Are you telling me that any government is going to disenfranchise this large a constituent overnight? We’re talking about rural areas – Scotland, Wales, coastal areas on England. It’s not going to happen.
Then there are the “digital refuseniks” who won’t buy a box. They’re going to have to be given them. It’s all going to make Channel Five’s video retuning programme pale into insignificance.
The other daft story came from The Sunday Times, which seems to have seen some kind of report suggesting that the BBC could be broken up into regional parts. Not going to happen. It’s probably some kind of off-the-wall idea kicked around in a Whitehall brainstorm somewhere. It makes no sense. Of course we’re going to lose national BBC news and just get a load of local bulletins, and lots of locally scheduled programmes. Makes economic sense doesn’t it? Makes political sense too? Last time I looked, despite devolution, we’re still part of the “United Kingdom”.
It soon becomes clear in the article that what all the draft report really contains is a bunch of ideas about the BBC’s future. I imagine that reporting to Ofcom is very much on the cards, but anything too drastic is unlikely in my mind following Hutton.
If someone could explain in clear logical steps why ITV or Five should get any licnce fee money, when they manage to make plenty of profits from a scarce resource while having to make a certain amount of PSB programming, then I’d be keen to hear it. Just because ITV has to make The South Bank Show, it’s not a cost the licence fee payer should have to bear. Give the licence back if that’s too onerous an obligation.
If BBC3 continues to be crap, then fare enough – change it’s remit. We’ve had BBC Choice and BBC Knowledge. We could get something else (Not sure what exactly).
So that was the biggest news story yesterday was it? It certainly was according to the Sunday Times.