BBC Four & CBBC to close

[Blubatt]

I've been holding onto my opinions for a couple of days now, but I will now finally weigh in. I was 5 years old when BBC Four, CBBC and Cbeebies originally launched, so I have a lot of strong memories of the latter two, growing up with them. CBBC, in my opinion, provides the best free to air children's channel today. Its quality far exceeds CITV Channel, and the Narrative Entertainment channels (Pop, Pop Max, and Tiny Pop). They succeed because the programming is original, and its audience are actually treated like adults, in the sense that they get a good depth of content that is made for them, instead of mindless entertainment.

The BBC is saying its not closing CBBC, but having a dedicated space on iPlayer is tantamount to closing it. Not only do you lose the channel, but you lose the presenters, you lose the personality, and you lose pretty much everything that matters about the service. A child is not going to have the same interaction they get with watching a channel air on TV, then they would clicking a button and having a whole series there. I also think that creates bad habits in children. Making them expect things to just be there, and losing that sense of anticipation and build up. Nowadays, its just a trailer, a show is dropped, wait another 1-2 years, and repeat. Where's the fun in that? The BBC have not learned the lesson from last time. Killing BBC Three and bringing it back to life has just screwed over their young adult audience. There's a whole generation of kids now who didn't have BBC Three. That's why the viewing figures are as they are.

As for BBC Four, I think that its time has been coming for a while, and its really a shame. I get having it as a primarily archive driven channel, but the iPlayer can just host an archive of all its old shows. The BBC Archive is much deeper and broader than what is on iPlayer, and BBC Four is even narrower than that.

As it goes, here is what I would be doing to save the BBC Money:

1. Just make the iPlayer and Sounds subscription services. People will buy it if its at a good price. Just spruce it up, upload a ton of archive content that you don't have on there, and maybe the odd original. Have the free service, but only have people able to watch programmes for up to 24 hours after they aired.
2. I agree with merging BBC World News and BBC News into One Service. I think that works better to be honest, as it would make the English language service easier to air internationally.
3. BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Three need to be channels that have exclusive content first. Incentivise people to watch the channel, and with the added revenue of the subscribers on BBC iPlayer who will pay to access live feeds.
4. If you really want to end BBC Four, don't make it an online only channel. Just don't bother. At that point, it isn't BBC Four. Why'd ya think BBC Three didn't work?
5. If you really want to end CBBC, then end Cbeebies too. Have them on BBC One and BBC Two in the afternoons like the old days. It will clear out a lot of the daytime filler.