[harshy]

I been watching the global feed and it’s not too bad but I do agree those weird pregnant pauses is weird particularly on the world feed where the picture jumps, the ticker is baffling and of course the lower thirds are the old style which when they can’t fade it off quickly enough covers the NEWS bit at the bottom.

Agreed with the static camera shots, but I do enjoy the bits where the correspondent is next to the screens though as you get to see all these wonderful feeds which you’d only see if you worked for them.

[Newsroom]

I’ve still not warmed to it and doubt I will.

The change was way too drastic, a lack of testing has left me feeling pretty negative towards it.

I’m a BBC boy through and through with added CNN, but this broke that mould.

Terrible service for those stop watching in the UK and paying for it!

[Kojak]

I’ve still not warmed to it and doubt I will.

The change was way too drastic, a lack of testing has left me feeling pretty negative towards it.

I’m a BBC boy through and through with added CNN, but this broke that mould.

Terrible service for those stop watching in the UK and paying for it!

I don't understand why it wasn't tested more. Four of the 'fab five' were in rehearsals for a month, were they not? (Not Yalda Hakim - I understand she spent a good chunk of that time making a special report on the Taliban's treatment of drug addicts). Unless, as seems to be the BBC way, most of the ideas dreamt up before and during rehearsals were scrapped, leaving them to build a whole new channel on the fly? I don't know (and if anyone here does, I'd love to be set straight on what really happened). Like you, I still think it's a bit rubbish that we who pay the licence fee are the poor relations. Maybe this is the inevitable direction of travel - but I'd like to think we could have at least gotten a few more years out of the News Channel. I don't know - I'm just rambling at this point.

[DTV]

Terrible service for those stop watching in the UK and paying for it!

Well, paying for around a third of it.

Ultimately, the central paradox of the new channel is that, if the UK audience is to get bespoke content in future (without a sudden turnaround in BBC finances), it requires the profitability of the international channel. It may not be popular, but the new channel taking more after BBC World News always made more financial and editorial sense.

[sparkyb28]

regarding the around the UK and the breaks for ads why doesn’t the UK feed just run a looping news headline graphics, NBC Now do a similar thing and it works really well. It would give them flexibility on time and they could come out of it with a news globe wipe.

They could use a combo of both across the uk and the graphics loop depending on slot.

[justinh]

I’m not a fan of the ‘Around the UK’ segments and would much rather it was just a quick read-through of a few UK stories. If the UK opt presenter is going to be on hand all day anyway, then they may as well go back to what they did twenty years ago and do the handover from the ‘World’ presenter to the UK presenter for a moment or two. The quarter past/quarter to breaks are only 1 minute long at the moment though so would probably need extending to two minutes to make it worthwhile - otherwise you’ve only really got time to summarise a few stories.

There have been more UK opts than I expected and they seem decently resourced (apart from the studio/set leaving something to be desired), but I don’t think they quite work at the moment. I know they’ve spoken about wanting to do single story streams for iPlayer and that the UK opts are one and the same, but when the UK opts out now it means that a story will get blanket coverage until the end of the opt. This often comes across as overkill, especially when things are delayed and they run out of things to talk about! Restructuring those opts so that, if needs be, they can take a breather for a round-up of other UK news, the odd weather forecast etc, would be a big improvement.

The hybrid agenda of this service continues to baffle me.

Sky News is now clearly the only proper UK TV news channel left (no, GB News doesn't count). If you go to get a quick TV wrap of the news from the BBC, then you're most likely getting a World News bulletin with a UK story tacked on. Who knows, maybe some people might like that?

The UK breaking opts make sense to a degree. Viewership of news channels can be very breaking news-driven (far from appointment viewing), and the BBC still wants to hold that audience. Makes sense from an online perspective too. My only thought is that the cost savings must really have come from hugely stripping out producing/tech staff, because implementing austerity measures by paying a standby presenter to twiddle their thumbs all day waiting for breaking news seems a bit daft.

Call the channel BBC News - it's the home of the BBC's news output on television that you can't find anywhere else (at least in the UK). Retain the BBC World News brand globally - the BBC still has enough left in the tank to produce a high-quality global-facing news channel, I think.

Dump the UK/World agenda bulletins and simulcast world bulletins as "BBC World News" - if someone wants to watch a UK news bulletin, they'll be headed to Sky News anyways.

Dump the 1/6/10/Newsnight simulcasts. If we're desperately in need of television wayfinding and doubt people can use the Freeview Guide, then create a programme menu during the programme breaks that signposts where you can find stuff. Who knows, maybe you can even use that strip of white at the bottom of the screen for something useful rather than just a URL.

Keep Nicky Campbell. Seems to work fine. Just work out how to incorporate UK opts better in case of breaking news.

Bring in programmes like The Nine that otherwise don't air anywhere else anyways. We're trying to save money here aren't we?

Just some ideas, but it's not an easy issue to fix. Figuring all this out is figuring out what the imagined audience and what the future of the channel will ultimately be.

[whistlerpro]

I’m not a fan of the ‘Around the UK’ segments and would much rather it was just a quick read-through of a few UK stories. If the UK opt presenter is going to be on hand all day anyway, then they may as well go back to what they did twenty years ago and do the handover from the ‘World’ presenter to the UK presenter for a moment or two. The quarter past/quarter to breaks are only 1 minute long at the moment though so would probably need extending to two minutes to make it worthwhile - otherwise you’ve only really got time to summarise a few stories.

There have been more UK opts than I expected and they seem decently resourced (apart from the studio/set leaving something to be desired), but I don’t think they quite work at the moment. I know they’ve spoken about wanting to do single story streams for iPlayer and that the UK opts are one and the same, but when the UK opts out now it means that a story will get blanket coverage until the end of the opt. This often comes across as overkill, especially when things are delayed and they run out of things to talk about! Restructuring those opts so that, if needs be, they can take a breather for a round-up of other UK news, the odd weather forecast etc, would be a big improvement.

The hybrid agenda of this service continues to baffle me.

Sky News is now clearly the only proper UK TV news channel left (no, GB News doesn't count). If you go to get a quick TV wrap of the news from the BBC, then you're most likely getting a World News bulletin with a UK story tacked on. Who knows, maybe some people might like that?

The UK breaking opts make sense to a degree. Viewership of news channels can be very breaking news-driven (far from appointment viewing), and the BBC still wants to hold that audience. Makes sense from an online perspective too. My only thought is that the cost savings must really have come from hugely stripping out producing/tech staff, because implementing austerity measures by paying a standby presenter to twiddle their thumbs all day waiting for breaking news seems a bit daft.

Call the channel BBC News - it's the home of the BBC's news output on television that you can't find anywhere else (at least in the UK). Retain the BBC World News brand globally - the BBC still has enough left in the tank to produce a high-quality global-facing news channel, I think.

Dump the UK/World agenda bulletins and simulcast world bulletins as "BBC World News" - if someone wants to watch a UK news bulletin, they'll be headed to Sky News anyways.

Dump the 1/6/10/Newsnight simulcasts. If we're desperately in need of television wayfinding and doubt people can use the Freeview Guide, then create a programme menu during the programme breaks that signposts where you can find stuff. Who knows, maybe you can even use that strip of white at the bottom of the screen for something useful rather than just a URL. 

Keep Nicky Campbell. Seems to work fine. Just work out how to incorporate UK opts better in case of breaking news.

Bring in programmes like The Nine that otherwise don't air anywhere else anyways. We're trying to save money here aren't we?

Just some ideas, but it's not an easy issue to fix. Figuring all this out is figuring out what the imagined audience and what the future of the channel will ultimately be.

There seem to be too many contradictions at the moment, if there is major breaking news Nicky Campbell will often drop the phone in to cover it, and they increasingly seem to be dropping in appropriate b-roll etc. In which case why opt out to the news room at all? Same with world news, when it’s covering the same story it seems to do it with more flair/production value anyway…

[justinh]

The hybrid agenda of this service continues to baffle me.

Sky News is now clearly the only proper UK TV news channel left (no, GB News doesn't count). If you go to get a quick TV wrap of the news from the BBC, then you're most likely getting a World News bulletin with a UK story tacked on. Who knows, maybe some people might like that?

The UK breaking opts make sense to a degree. Viewership of news channels can be very breaking news-driven (far from appointment viewing), and the BBC still wants to hold that audience. Makes sense from an online perspective too. My only thought is that the cost savings must really have come from hugely stripping out producing/tech staff, because implementing austerity measures by paying a standby presenter to twiddle their thumbs all day waiting for breaking news seems a bit daft.

Call the channel BBC News - it's the home of the BBC's news output on television that you can't find anywhere else (at least in the UK). Retain the BBC World News brand globally - the BBC still has enough left in the tank to produce a high-quality global-facing news channel, I think.

Dump the UK/World agenda bulletins and simulcast world bulletins as "BBC World News" - if someone wants to watch a UK news bulletin, they'll be headed to Sky News anyways.

Dump the 1/6/10/Newsnight simulcasts. If we're desperately in need of television wayfinding and doubt people can use the Freeview Guide, then create a programme menu during the programme breaks that signposts where you can find stuff. Who knows, maybe you can even use that strip of white at the bottom of the screen for something useful rather than just a URL. 

Keep Nicky Campbell. Seems to work fine. Just work out how to incorporate UK opts better in case of breaking news.

Bring in programmes like The Nine that otherwise don't air anywhere else anyways. We're trying to save money here aren't we?

Just some ideas, but it's not an easy issue to fix. Figuring all this out is figuring out what the imagined audience and what the future of the channel will ultimately be.

There seem to be too many contradictions at the moment, if there is major breaking news Nicky Campbell will often drop the phone in to cover it, and they increasingly seem to be dropping in appropriate b-roll etc. In which case why opt out to the news room at all? Same with world news, when it’s covering the same story it seems to do it with more flair/production value anyway…

Yes. I think to a certain degree - this stuff is impossible to avoid when you're trying to operate an opt-out system for developing news that you can't predict the direction of. That said, it has been clumsy in the past month, surely this is stuff you can at least try to prep for a bit with rehearsed fake scenarios and the like? At the very least, find smarter ways to crash in/out of the World feed. 

As for Nicky Campbell, having him compromise his 5Live show to make it somewhat work for TV is a bit daft. Down the same lines of having a dual news agenda. What imagined audience are you serving? People who tune in to watch breaking news aren't going to be satisfied with watching a radio show on TV.

[Rolling News]

       

The old BBC News logo sort of making its way into the late News tonight.

[matthieu1221]

The issue with the opt-outs as others have pointed out is that once a decision is made to opt-out, the opt-out sticks with the story. Whilst on a more 'natural' news channel if the story doesn't warrant wall-to-wall coverage (or if there's not enough info to stick with it with rolling coverage yet), they'll go back to some other stories and check back in from time to time especially if there are new developments. Opting in and out repeatedly is something that would be messy (CNNi does that sometimes with CNN and you often end up crashing in halfway through an interview), so naturally the other solution would be to run some other stories in the meantime. The issue is, there doesn't seem to be a bank of reports sitting around which could be used to sustain the opt-out because the content is more live interview-driven (and you can't just clone a contributor who's speaking on the international feed to also be speaking to the opt-out too).