[DTV]

And some people here will be getting "reality check" followed by "I told you so" from me when this merger/compromise does crash and burn so don't expect me to back down on this, i don't care if i live in fantasy land or the only person on here who has this opinion, it's what needs to happen-Good night!

Look, nobody is saying that the merger is going to be amazing - based on what we know, pretty much the best-case scenario is that the new channel is not-terrible. But that's the situation the BBC is in - they need to make £500m in annual savings. For scale, the closure of the News channel will merely plug 10% of that funding gap. These cuts aren't a trim being made maliciously, but a radical restructuring out of existential necessity.

Now, you can not like that, you can think that the proposals for the merger aren't great or could reasonably be better - this is a forum, we're all entitled to an opinion. But I'm a bit bored of the somewhat selfish 'the service/programmes I use and like should be exempted from cuts' attitude (or in your case 'should get a sigificant funding increase'). That's not really reasonable when talking about unavoidable cuts of this scale, especially when talking about a supplementary service that has historically seen below average cuts.

Also, while you are entitled to believe that the outcome of the channel being seen to fail will be a wholesale reversal of all changes since 2015, I think it is right that any belief this is actually plausible is labelled fantasistal. While there is undoubtedly some level of an increased UK service that could appear if the new channel's UK offering is deemed insufficient, it just isn't going to be on the scale of even a return to the channel as it is today. There just won't be the money or the staff. Without a significant and unforseeable turnaround in BBC finances, the best you'll be able to hope for is something involving a different utilisation what is left of the BBC's UK news resources after April.