[DTV]

How long do we think before there's some sort off reversion?

Given this somewhat confused mess was months in the planning, I wouldn't hold my breath about it being any time soon, even if they decided to go down that route. (Plus, as ever, it's important to remember we should wait until the full merged service launches before signing the death warrant, etc.).

More seriously, though, some kind of 'reverse' is obviously possible, but it's really a question of money and what kind of service would be acceptable. We know that the licence fee contribution to the new channel is about £35m (down from £60m for the old BBC News channel), so there clearly is a bit of wiggleroom. But it isn't as simple as reverting to a pre-2023 version of the News channel, not least as many staff will have been let go. There's lot of focus on presenters and studios, but the actual costs of presenters and studio production staff is only going to run into a few million - the bulk of cuts are coming from newsgathering and the reduction in location reporting, contributor costs, etc.

If you were to primarily play out VTs prepared for network/regional news with a presenter linking between them, you could actually return to pre-2015 levels of UK-only output within the new smaller budget, but a lighter newsgathering operation means your ability to break and explain news would be significantly reduced. Would that make a particularly worthwhile channel? Why not just repeat network bulletins on a loop? Any UK-only service more akin to what is to be expected of the News channel would require a more limited output than what we had until even last week and would still suffer from a reduced UK newsgathering operation.

Ultimately, it's hard to argue that this week has struck a good balance, particularly not from the perspective of world viewers. But I don't think the project is wholly unworkable, it just needs to be done radically differently from what has happened so far. A sensible balance in shared hours + a decent UK breaking/developing news opt + some dedicated UK news hours could be a fairly decent channel in its own right, it's just a matter of hoping the BBC gets there before it's too late.