The end of F1 on the BBC?

[Brogan]

The BBC is today setting out details of how we plan to save £150 million to address a shortfall in funding identified earlier this year.
...
£35 million will be saved from the BBC’s TV sports rights budget. Meeting this savings target will be tough, particularly given the high levels of inflation in the market. We therefore anticipate this will lead to the loss of some existing rights and events. We have already made some tough choices which have contributed to the savings, for instance around the Open Golf. However, we have also recently secured a series of important rights – including Wimbledon, Premier League highlights, live coverage of Euro 2016 and 2020 football championships and Six Nations rugby shared with ITV

BBC - BBC sets out plans to deliver £150 million savings - Media Centre

 

[Greenlantern101]

Shouldn't this be in non-news. It was only a matter of time.

 

[RasputinLives]

I just saw David Coulthard down the job centre

 

[cider_and_toast]

Apart from Wimbledon and the 6 Nations the BBC have no other live scheduled sporting events left so the only thing they can get rid of is F1. As GL has said, from the moment they chopped half of their coverage this was only a matter of time.

All of the other events, the Olympics, Euro 16 etc are one off's.

 

[Greenlantern101]

With £700 million in cuts by 2021 this title might as well read 'The end of the BBC?'

It costs us £145 per year that is in total £3.7 Billion per year. And for that, all I want is a website, 4 tv stations, and 5 radio stations. With decent sports, dramas and documentaries. Thats it.

What they actually do is run around 40 radio stations (regional and world wide) and around 20 TV stations including 12 worldwide stations and are now stretched so thin they have no money left to make or buy content for them.

The whole thing is so big and over stretched it can't do anything other than fail.

 

[Bill Boddy]

....
The whole thing is so big and over stretched it can't do anything other than fail.

A bit like F1 then.

 

[Incubus]

It's not just about F1 and it's not just sport though. Whether you're talking about TV coverage or website features everything about the BBC is getting more and tabloid-like. The webssite is now full of those crappy irritating stupid little features like "10-reasons-why-you-should-never-blah-blah" and so on, filled the kind of pseudo-scientific crap written by some "specialist" no-one ever heard of.

Any old way of filling content without spending money. Just like those kinds of ads at the bottom of pages they get money for everytime someone clicks on them.

Meanwhile the list of proper services keeps diminishing the license fee keeps the same or rising. In any other kind of business you get what you pay for. With the beeb you get less and less and you pay more and more...

 

[Brogan]

Ecclestone has already made it clear they can't alter the contract.

"What they would like to do is not spend as much money. They want to know if they can schedule it different ways or pay a bit less now," Ecclestone is quoted as saying by The Telegraph.

"They don't have a lot of choice because they've got a contract. They're there for another three years."

Ecclestone expects BBC to honour contract

 

[Il_leone]

Well I hope Barbara Slater is no longer in charge of the Sports division at the BBC because it seems like everything under her stewardship has been sold off or the BBC have lost the rights to.

There won;t be any sports coverage on BBC apart from under achieving footballers

 

[Il_leone]

This deal the BBC made with Bernie is the one they wanted so now they are going to Bernie and saying they can't afford it will spell the death knell for F1 on terrestrial tv

 

[F1Brits_90]

at the moment you wouldnt blame bbc dropping the live F1 because until these rules sort out so that cars are able to follow each other without the tyres falling off a performance cliff. ie: last week lewis hamilton v nico rosberg, then passing viewers will probably stay away

but is ridiculous that sport gets cut all the time, because ive always thought merge bbc 3 & 4, also yes the drama series can be fantastic but where else (excluding sherlock) are you going to get 10m+ people watching the fa cup/ 6 nations or wimbledon that gets the nation talking or happy in the way of 2012 olympics

 

[Il_leone]

terrestrial tv is what creates F1 following and the BBC are mad seeing Lewis Hamilton is at his peak and a regular race winner which should give it more incentive to show F1

 

[Bill Boddy]

F1 is expensive to broadcast because the fees are so high; Sky get it to pay because there are sufficient viewers willing the pay to watch it, the BBC does not have that luxury. The BBC cannot sell it off to other broadcasters.

Most of the drama shows are sold on to other companies both in the UK and elsewhere, overall these reduce the cost of producing them by quite a good percentage.

News is news, the BBC broadcasts to many other countries, the government seem to find this quite useful especially as it does not cost them anything.

Then there are a large number of programmes which are very cheap to make; just watch on BBC1 any time from 9:15 am until 1 pm and 2 pm to 6 pm. These have quite a large percentage of the off-peak audience; you may sneer at them but then they are not aimed at sports viewers.

Then there are the documentaries, consumer programmes, history programmes, science programmes etc. These are factual, some of them can be sold on, some are not; the one thing that most of them have is the spreading of knowledge in a watchable manner. Some which I have watched this year have been most of the Horizon programmes (what did come before the big bang?), the Plantagenet series, this year's harvest and food production and many more.

Finally we come to the politics programmes such as the Andrew Marr show. This also includes Question Time where politicians and other political commentators answer questions from Joe Public; they are subjected to grilling from the audience which some clearly do not relish, there should be one of these every day of the week, actually meeting members of the public is a politician's worst nightmare.

The BBC also paid for the digitisation of UK broadcasting. This as to free up airwave bandwidths so that the government could sell the various frequencies, bringing them in shedloads of money.

Remember when watching Freeserve that it was the BBC that paid for it for you.

 

[Porceliamone]

Nice to see that shovelling the F1 off in favour of the Voice was an enormous success (now that it's also been poached by ITV). What a bunch of morons.

The BBC probably won't even show the Olympics in a few years time as that goes out to bid too. Excellent. More time for quality educational programming like Eastenders and Don't Tell The Bride.

 

[Bill Boddy]

As opposed to Emmerdale and Coronation Street et al.

 

[Brogan]

Those aren't paid for by taxes so the commercial channels are free to dish up whatever crap they like.

 

[Il_leone]

I wonder how many managers (and stars) are actually overpaid at the BBC to justify their salary for what rubbish they give the public

 

[FB]

Stars pay (bit out of date):

Salaries and expenses of the BBC's top execs:

BBC - Salaries and Expenses - Inside the BBC

 

[Brogan]

Jonathan Ross was on £6 million a year before he left for ITV in 2010.
He claimed he was underpaid.

Jonathan Ross defends BBC salary - BBC News
BBC reveals £54m annual pay to its top presenters

 

[Il_leone]

well why can't they make pay cut to some of the "stars" so to speak

If they don't like it they will got elsewhere for money but would say Lineker pass up doing Match of the Day if he knew he was getting a paycut to save the show