According to reports the BBC are going to announce further cuts to their Sports coverage budget.

On the way out will be Darts, Snooker and Formula 1.

Losing F1 from terrestrial TV will be a blow to many people and it isn't going to be good for the Sport.

Also reported the Red Button service will also be axed.

Many countries have already lost live coverage of F1 altogether from non pay-TV; it's the FOM media strategy and until the last drop of money has been wrung from the few fans left with access, it will carry on. The problem, of course, is that there will then be too few fans left to revive the sport and it will have killed itself.
I sympathise with the BBC - I'm sure they would love to keep the audience F1 provides, but squeezed by government-enforced cuts on one side and the implacable Ecclestone money extorting machine on the other, it's no contest, really.

Simple solution, keep f1 drop suzy as a cost cutting exercise!

Wonder how much of the deficit is from lost top gear income....

Do we, the people paying for the BBC, get a say in what they spend the money on?

There are a hundred BBC shows I would happily have cancelled if it meant there was money in the pot to compete for F1.

ITV seem to be taking over as the main supplier of sport on tv. It now shows snooker, darts and I believe even boxing the other night. The Beeb has a few race meetings a year for the nags fans but little else. Makes you wonder if the licence is worth the money. If it wasn't for the dramas...

Watched the highlights show instead of the live race this weekend. Cuts out the boring bits ! Don't think i'd miss F1 if it wasn't shown on tv. Its usually a procession anyway with Mercedes dominating and Ferrari picking up the scraps

I've drifted away from F1 in recent years, after waiting for HD to come along, I'd pretty much lost interest by the time it finally arrived on BBC1 HD

Not being a great sports fan, it's nice to watch the odd footie or rugby match, it would be nice to see TdF in HD but I will never subscribe to Sky.

It's only the dramas (Eastenders not included of course) and nature programmes that are worth keeping IMHO, no "talent" shows please

I think your point about HD is a good one Dave- F1 could be worth paying for. They are awesome machines in the flesh but so little of that comes through the TV.

Not keen on them dropping the red button - always been a good facility ?

Does the Red Button option really cost all that much to run?

Sadly, yes... it's effectively another channel, and as well as paying for the staff and facilities, you also need to pay for the bandwidth on the broadcast. That's why BBC3 is going online only, and may disappear completely.

To be honest, what you get on the BBC for your 30p a day or so is incredible; none of the commercial carriers can come anywhere near on either price or quality and of course we won't even mention the commercials.

The problem is, the government doesn't like the BBC and has comprehensively shafted them by requiring them to be part of the social services and supply 75-year-olds and over for free - that's a quarter of their budget. Add another eighth for the world service that the BBC is required to provide and which was previously a grant in aid from the government, and something *has* to give.

Problem is, everyone has their own version of what to lose... I'd be happy with BBC2, BBC4, and Radio 4 (and possibly R2 in the evening sometime)... Radio 1 should be sold off this morning and R3 this afternoon, and half of BBC1 is pointless clickbait. I'm also not sure if most of the BBC's network output (as opposed to broadcast) is strictly necessary, particularly with the loophole that means people are watching catchup instead of live and paying no license. Though that may change soon.

Interesting times. At least they can't touch my pension, but they might stop paying into the fund...

Dave, the TdF is available in HD on Eurosport. Although you do have to have a subscription package like SKY/BT etc which I suppose defeats the object for a lot of people...

Well BBC3 is only half a channel anyway, like BBC4, only starts at 7pm, what's that all about? Red button is fun for a short while, flicking channels during Glastonbury or Wimbledon, or the Olympics (when it works) but otherwise is not used very much is it?

And what about all those BBC regional channels outputting identical stuff to the main channel 99% of the time, and then for 1% of the time showing local news (except still not in HD ) again, what's that all about? (Maybe that's only on Freesat?)

I think CBBC and Cbeebies use the same bandwith from 7 am to 7pm. meaning they can have seperate channel with less bandwidth.



Probably too expensive to produce local news in HD and the regional channels use the same basic bandwidth so I would assume the costs is minimal.

Ah yes, forgot about CBeebies/CBBC, kids are a lot older now, so no Teletubbies for me any more

Actually, last time I looked, it's *all* produced in HD; occasionally one region's local program will be broadcast on the HD transmitter. The problem is that there's effectively only one HD transmitter group so it's technically difficult to do a regional opt-out.

(Programmes are broadcast from London/Manchester/Glasgow and pumped onto a country-wide internal network. The local stations either pass through (most of the time) or opt out of this national programming and feed their own material to the local transmitter on SD - but the HD network can't be done the same way. As it happens, I did my engineering training with the guy who was head of HD transmission for years while it was being developed; one day I'll get round to asking him why this was so. I installed a lot of the digital infrastructure that makes all this possible and from memory there ought to be enough bandwidth to play with, but it could be a cost issue.)

But then the obvious reply is if ITV can do it, why can't Auntie?

Does ITV do local opts in HD? I rarely watch ITV, and never its news broadcasts, so I couldn't comment.

Even if they do is that value for money? I would rather keep other services at the expense of HD local news. I do wonder why they couldnt boardcast sd news on the HD channel so to keep a continuous service rather than the holding screen they have now. Probably a technical reason for it.

<investigated a bit> Turns out ITV only opt the four super regions; you can do that at the transmitter. The BBC has something like thirty regions and the equipment to do it would cost ten to twenty million quid.

STV does.

Couldn't have watched Downton any other way

Or more to the point, the Rugby Word Cup

Neil was aking about local news broadcasts not main programming.

money which is better spent elsewhere i would say.

Ok

I would happily live with a non local news rather than a dead screen caption saying we'll be back - totally pathetic. They can't even manage a 2 min HD highlight programme or something else other than a red screen