BBC Four & CBBC to close

[Kunst]

Having had a day to think about it overall I think the proposals are fairly reasonable, considering the situation they find themselves in with the licence fee.

With CBBC I'd have thought that most weekdays between 9am and 3pm there wouldn't be many viewers, as the majority will be in school.  For those off sick there's offerings on iPlayer, as well as commercial offerings such as Netflix/Prime/Disney+.  I'd like to think they'd consider reintroducing a limited amount of CBBC on BBC Two to allow some original content to get a linear showing, for example 5.15 to 6pm weekdays, and maybe Sunday mornings (similar to Saturdays).

For BBC Four it's fair to say the channel has already been stripped back quite a bit.  Hopefully some of it's remaining content can be moved over to BBC Two, now that BBC Three has returned, and that might strengthen BBC Two's output.  Axing the channel along with CBBC means that there isn't 12 hours a day of essentially dead airtime.  I think it was still right for BBC Three to return to linear, as previous you had "BBC One, Two, Four" when looking at your TV guide.  At least now "BBC One/Two/Three" doesn't give an awkward numeric gap.

The closure of the Oxford and Cambridge opt-outs is one that'll presumably get relatively few objections national.  As well as saving on broadcasting additional regional news programmes it presumably saves money on not needing separate BBC One HD channels for Cambridge and Oxford.  Both already get share their Sunday Politics show with the wider region (e.g. Cambridge & Norwich), so the local politicians won't lose out on their appearances.  It'll be interesting to see if BBC One North still goes ahead now.

A very reasonable and balanced post I would say (with the same observations I had): moving CBBC to something like 4pm-6pm as a window on Two, would definitely work, just as moving some BBC4 content on Two.


They save a whole frequency this time , with no dead time, and YEAH, BBC One-Two-Three work a lot better than BBC One-Two-Four!!
I so think shutting down Three was a big mistake!