[Stooky Bill]

Is the  bulk of the cost in running a second studio or in producing enough packages to sustain two programmes?

It's a bit of both, producing news is expensive - it takes people to do the reporting and producing. In a lot of ways it's cheaper than it was 20 years ago but to do it properly still costs. They'll still have to produce some new content for the now axed regions but it won't be as much as now 

But it also costs to run a studio too, it needs a crew rota'd on for the day, although I'm sure a lot of those studio crew would do other things in the day like editing. It also needs maintenance and upgrading, both centres would have been due an upgrade to HD, that's a saving. The upgrade to HD transmission that's coming up will have been made easier and cheaper with two fewer BBC1's. Other bits of technical infrastructure not being needed will save money in the long term, circuits for example


I know someone who freelanced at BBC Cambridge when they extended their bulletin to a full half hour. Apparently they managed to do that without it costing much more. In fact their colleagues at Norwich were a bit surprised that they could manage it with so few resources - it made them look rather over staffed and over resourced.