[DTV]

For starters, BBC Three. What was the point of bringing that back as a linear channel, doubling its budget to £80 million, only for the BBC to then announce a couple of months later that BBC Four, CBBC and the News Channel were for the chop? Now there is talk that BBC Four might stay and Three could be shut down again - so what was the point? BBC Three's target audience just don't watch linear TV.

I agree that bringing back BBC Three as a linear channel wasn't a great idea, but I don't think spending more on content for its target audience is and wouldn't support siphoning money away from content for that audience towards a channel whose viewer profile is pretty much the complete opposite. As I've said elsewhere on here, I think that the BBC should actually be going harder on consolidating their linear services and their inability to actually commit to closing channels is just wasting a ton of money on zombie channels that rack up 10s of £m in broadcasting costs. While actually closing a pair of channels would free up some extra money purely on such costs, I'd need convincing that the News channel was a deserving recipient.

I do see the attraction in wanting to keep the weekday daytime service, but evenings and weekends do rate better - if there was to be some UK-only content, wouldn't it make more sense to spread it more evenly and more towards the viewer? Ultimately, I'm increasingly of the view that the better option would've been a partial (or even full) consolidation of 5 Live and the News channel into a single bi-modal channel (with radio opt outs for sport) focussed on UK news. Obviously, that would have been a more radical route (and I have no doubt that this forum would have equally hated it), but it would've been doable and would have solved the financial issue of two hard-to-trim UK news services.