[interestednovice]

It's definitely right to say that Sky News is better pretty much across the board than the BBC News channel these days - being more interesting in content, formats and presentation, as well as at least having a clear sense of what it is trying to do and who it is trying to serve.

That said, not sure it's right to say that Sky News costs less than the BBC News channel alone. As you say, Sky News is around £90-100m; based on the piecemeal public data, BBC News channel is somewhere around £50-70m - both BBC channels were in that region before, but UK contributions were cut by about 50% and World weren't bringing in as much advertising towards the end as they had done previously, so would guess that World contributions to the budget are down too. It could be a bit higher than that ballpark, but can't see it adding up to Sky levels.

But as I've said previously, I'm not sure that all the bizarre choices around the new channel are budget related - the presentation and format seems to be (at least in part) out of a deliberate (and misguided) attempt to ape Outside Source and The Context across the day.

The emulation of Outside Source & The Context, I can only guess, is part of a drive to compete with opinion-led US news channels for the US market (especially with the upcoming election). However, especially to the British viewer, it is not “the BBC they are used to” and is a major disappointment. As you alluded to, given the huge amount of LF money that still contributes to the channel (at a guess, at least 50%) it very much feels like the UK viewer is getting a raw deal.