BBC Four & CBBC to close

[Newshound47]

Well, unless Cbeebies is going as well, they are unlikely to save on any transmission costs. When BBC 3 was closed, the bandwidth (that is shared with CBBC) was just left to tred water (except for the two hour evening extension CBBC was given)

I guess in Scotland some of the bandwidth freed up could be used for BBC Three HD.  In the other nations whilst it could be used as an evening/nightime red button feed I doubt that be much of a saving.  If it wasn't for Scottish politics there would probably be a greater saving made by merging the BBC Scotland channel back into BBC Two Scotland. 

An extreme saving would be closing BBC Four and then making BBC Two 6pm to 6am and have it timeshare with CBeebies, though I very much doubt that would happen for a variety of reasons.

They would need somewhere for the daytime live sport BBC Two has several weeks of the year if they did that. Including two of their flagship sport rights.

---

They will be massive backlash to closing BBC Four. I think through old v young and it could very explosive as people instead propose closing 1extra and the Asian network.

---

It’s understandable. Something’s gotta give, and the backlash from BBC Three closing down and then re-opening means that BBC Four was always next at risk.

With most of the archive material the channel now broadcasts readily available on the iPlayer, it makes less sense for the channel to keep going - especially with viewership not being spectacular.

I would expect the likes of the TOTP repeats and some other programming to transfer to BBC Two. I suspect that’s why stuff like The Story of TOTP series has been broadcast on BBC Two. When the remit of one BBC channel starts to blur into another BBC channel, you just know somethings on the horizon.

The problem is a lot the audience who watch archive stuff don’t use Iplayer because they don’t understand how or they haven’t got it set up (if you use freeview you have to connect your box or Tv to wifi and not everyone does.)