[DTV]

It would be interesting to know what the budget is for the "new" UK version of the news channel - especially as 20 years ago ITV were said to be delivering their news channel for a fraction of what BBC News 24 cost at the time, and managing live UK news from early morning till late night, plus updates overnight, at that time. Given where the BBC News Channel is heading you have to assume their new budget specifically for the news channel is even less than that - and if not perhaps questions need to be asked about whether rather than BBC World being the profitable service keeping a UK operation afloat are funds actually being funnelled into propping up BBC World.

Well the budget will be listed in next year's Annual Report, so we'll have to wait until then to be certain. But it's hard to tell what of the BBC News channel's ~£60m budget is actually channel related, as a substantial chunk of the budget is the channel's 'fair share' of newsgathering costs. The average BBC English region TV news operation costs about £6m and I'd suspect that the cost of the News channel's presenters and studio production teams alone are in that region, if not slightly higher.