[interestednovice]

Of course it could work if done correctly. It hasn’t been though.

The legal action as well is completely of their own doing.

I agree with you to an extent.

Is it possible to produce a professionally-run channel which covers the remit of both former channels, and includes an opt-out for U.K. viewers? Yes, of course it is technically possible.

Practically-speaking, is it almost certain that both sets of viewers are going to be dissatisfied compared to the predecessor services? I would say also yes, but probably not to the extent that they switch off in droves.

They probably could have made something decent out of it, but they really did mess up the initial launch so badly that it compounded the challenges by driving viewers away. Now it’s hard work to win those viewers back even if they sort out all of the issues with the channel. And it’s been over a year, but the service still isn’t “settled”. This is madness and can only really be described as a failure of management.

I tend to think that the legal action was avoidable as well. All they had to do was go by the book and give everyone a fair go at the process. What we’ve heard doesn’t seem to indicate that they did actually do this. It did not make sense that only seven-ish “Chief Presenters” could cover a whole channel, even if you expected others to appear at weekends. They were also terrified of being honest about what the new service was (World News, tweaked with U.K. stories and U.K. opts). I think the “public line” of buzzwords and nonsense about things like “one service, two streams” kind of tipped over into BBC insider thinking too, so the very people working on the project got confused about their focus, audience, what the output should be and so on.

The fact so many experienced people behind the scenes left all at the same time just made everything worse.

I hope they can now pull things back, but they very much threw the baby out with the bathwater last April.