[DTV]

So we're mixing up per annum and periodical revenue reductions; ignoring the simple facts the specific commission document is reflective of the long terms budgets of VT inserts - every edition uses similar content and will be a similar rate and commenting I'm the one comparing apples and oranges. Ok, misleading people by pretending its one off VT when you know - or should know - that it's a daily element within a show that has its own production costs on top.  

It's quite reasonable to point out that 5 pay ITN less/same per hour than a 7 min daily spot on the BBC show in a similar daypart as a small example of wider issues that I clearly state are very simplified.

I'm not sure what has been mixed up. Compared to ten years earlier, annual licence income in 2021/22 is 16% or £700m lower in real terms - I don't know what is objectionable about that fact. You can convert it to per annum, i.e., the BBC's income has on average fallen by more than the entire News channel budget each year over the past decade, but that still seems quite significant and doesn't include the even larger real term falls over the most recent and current financial years. (Indeed, the averages actually hide that, even before the current inflation rises, the BBC saw annual real falls of around £250m-£300m in 18/19, 19/20 and 21/22).

By one-off I was meaning that each VT is an independent commission, produced by a handful of different teams, rather than referring to its status as a regular feature (though the commissioning brief doesn't suggest daily). The duration isn't particularly relevant as production costs don't scale linearly with duration, the costs of a location shoot are different to those of a studio shoot and the cost of an entire individual production is different to that of one hour of a continuing series (particularly in terms of the distribution of staffing costs). It's like you can flip this by highlighting that an hour of BBC News channel is about £7,000, cheaper per hour than your C5 talk show, despite being significantly more resource heavy - but, of course, the reality is that they're not comparable due to the fact that costs are spread significantly differently.

And I'm not really sure what you mean by this 'management spin' that you keep mentioning. The real terms fall in licence income is objectively the main driver of BBC cuts and, generally, management love to claim efficiency savings can be made (even when they can't), because it means they don't have to make difficult decisions to actually cut entire services.