[DTV]

Anyway, I'm not particularly bothered anymore as I couldn't really care less about TV in general these days, but dropping "News 24" as the name in 2008 was a mistake. As has been proved, the rationale was flawed as people still drop 'BBC' from all sorts of things like iPlayer etc. And referring to it as the "News Channel" is actually worse than "News 24". At least back then, News 24 was a fairly well know BBC brand, whereas "the News Channel" could be absolutely anything.

But presenters don't on air call it 'the News channel' in the same way that they often dropped the BBC and called it just 'News 24', which was one of the issues correctly identified by branding experts. I also can't say I've ever really read or heard anybody call BBC News 'the News channel', except within threads on this forum and its predecessors when talking about different BBC News services.