[Stooky Bill]

Launching additional services when you cannot afford the current ones makes absolutely no sense especially as there is no prospect of additional funding from these services being launched.

Thing is that these sorts of channels are very cheap. It's a very good way of making the BBCs offering bigger at little cost. They already do it with online services like Cbeebies Radio, Radio 1 Dance and Radio 1 Relax, as well as the FAST streams on iPlayer.

These services don't require studios or any programmes they're mainly reusing existing content or playing out a curated music playlist. They're all run off playout systems with with little human intervention.

Remember too that Radio 4 LW is closing next month (as a station, the transmitter is stating on for now) so that's one less BBC radio service

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The Radio 2 extra station is something they should have done years ago. It doesn't sound like it'll have any live familiar voices, the familiarity you get at Boom or to an extent GHR.

Thing is that after much criticism that the BBC aren't catering for those who have grown out of Radio 2's, there will now be criticism that they're stepping on the toes of Boom.

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I doubt Radio 5 Sports Extra will stick around with this consultation apparently going around. I can see it closing with the Beeb pushing it's content towards BBC Sounds.

Quite the opposite, the consultation says they want to put more content on Sports Extra. Which is not a bad idea as long as it's not cutting the data rate of the other DAB stations permanently.

With the closure of Radio 4 LW it's even more important to have it on broadcast radio