[interestednovice]

I still struggle to see the financial sense in having a "UK opt standby team"...

Apparently the BBC can afford hiring and maintaining a team to standby, and spring into action to do UK opt-outs at any time from 0900 to 2300, but they can't afford to hire two shifts (or even one) and maintain a minimal core domestic service from 0900 to 1800 on weekdays?

Ridiculous isn't it and this is where the merger will fall down sooner or later-let's see if this is still going come Christmas/Easter 2024 or whether we end up getting the core domestic service back to 9:00am (10:00 am on Saturdays) to midnight regardless of cost (which i would ring fence).

Agreed, and I just posted similar thoughts in the other thread. If the BBC “can’t afford” to do news properly, what is the point of it and what are we paying a license fee for?!

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It will also mean the late edition of Sportsday is axed. Personally, I don’t really care about sport much so rarely watch Sportsday, but it’s clearly a useful programme to have in the schedule as part of a varied News diet. The News at Ten also tends to be a more serious bulletin so rarely covers sport. It would be nice not to lose it given the presenter will be there anyway for the 6:30pm edition. I struggle to see how they are really saving any money at all.

Losing the late Sportsday seems a bad idea. I can't are what, across the BBC, they provide that fills this gap given it would often have the results of the evenings sports.

Agreed. Even as someone who has, as I say, limited interest in sport myself, I can see the importance of the programme. There is no proper sports coverage either before or after Sportsday on any BBC output, and the branded evening programmes don’t contain sports updates (whereas normal daytime bulletins on the channel do). Sportsday therefore fills a big gap, and a late evening roundup of various results during the day has value. If anything, perhaps they should extend it to a full half-hour to cover the gap between the end of News at Ten and the start of Newsday?

Then they wouldn’t have to find content such as guide dogs, of an awkward length, and would not need to simulcast Newsnight (which is a pointless move and inexcusable when it means they will miss the TOTH - given that Newsday no longer has BOTH headlines, you would have to wait around 50 minutes until 1am for a headline roundup on a supposedly rolling news channel)!