[DTV]

I'm genuinely interested to hear why you think news cost inflation is higher than  average? 

Everything ive seen suggests the opposite: studio production tech is cheaper,  lower head counts, lower staff wages (as old school high earners retire) and things like contribution links are far lower - a liveU and a zoom is orders of magnitude cheaper than a sat truck

Good to have a more up-to-date figure - a 50% real budget cut in 15 years is certainly something of an achievement for a similar level of functionality, even if certain production costs have fallen.

In terms of News struggling with inflation, I'm just going on the fact that both BBC News channels spent the last decade repeatedly attempting to cut costs - including significant staffing cuts, programming reductions, etc. - and ended up with little real savings (indeed, the BBC News channel's 2022/23 budget was higher in real terms than a decade earlier). Going by few publicly available figures (which are likely less reliable), Sky News also seem to have found it difficult to substantively reduce costs. Though, given the different cost structures involved in news channels, perhaps that's just particular to them - they are notoriously financial black holes, while bulletin news is much easier to do cheaply. It's just very hard to find comparable data for other BBC News programming as they rework the way data is published every few years.