BBC to Cut More Than 1,000 Jobs, Creates ‘Simpler, Leaner’ Structure

[mvcg66b3r]

BBC director general Tony Hall has unveiled a restructuring program that will result in the loss of more than 1,000 jobs. The measures will deliver £50 million ($78 million) in savings from merging divisions, cutting down management layers, reducing the number of managers and improving processes.

“A simpler, leaner, BBC is the right thing to do, and it can also help us meet the financial challenges we face,” Hall said. “We’ve already significantly cut the costs of running the BBC, but in times of very tough choices we need to focus on what really matters — delivering outstanding programs and content for all our audiences.”

The BBC has already cut costs in recent years in order to deliver more than £1.5 billion ($2.34 billion) of savings a year by 2017. Much of this has been done through cutting administration and property costs, pay and headcount restraint, and decisions like more daytime repeats and shared sports rights.

The savings are necessary due to the government’s decision to freeze for seven years the license fee, which is the BBC’s primary source of funding. Also, as more people use video-on-demand services, the number of households owning television sets is falling, and so they don’t always buy a license. The license fee income in 2016-17 is forecast to be £150 million ($234 million) less than it was in 2011.

http://variety.com/2015/tv/global/bbc-to-cut-more-than-1000-jobs-1201533048/

 

[Mediafrog+]

For BBC World Service radio listeners this will probably mean further cuts to what's left of their shortwave output, as the audience continues to migrate to other platforms.

 

[Mario500]

I usually heard the BBC World Service's English programming through two "public radio" stations near me, through a telephonic service called Audio Now, and through the official World Wide Web site for the service.

 

[blizzard59]

Note that this announcement came before the separate announcement this week that, beginning in 2018, the BBC will be required to take on the cost of waiving the otherwise mandatory licence fee if any household in the UK has somebody over the age of 75 living in it. This was a policy put in place about 15 years ago by a government led by the Labour Party. Although control of government in the UK has since switched to the Conservative Party, the party has promised to keep the policy in place until at least 2020 (the year of the next UK general election). However, they have also continuously pledged to cut government spending. Transferring to the BBC the burden of paying for the policy is a way of fulfilling both promises, since the UK government, rather than the BBC, has been the one through the years paying for waiving the licence fee. A similar thing was done with the BBC World Service last year. Historically, this was paid for by grants from the UK government, but, beginning last year, the UK licence fee now pays for the the World Service, despite the fact that the World Service output isn't targeted toward audiences in the UK.

In any event, for the BBC, the result of paying for the TV licences for households with somebody over 75 is expected to essentially amount to a £750 million budget cut by 2020. Combined with the other de facto budget cuts the BBC has faced in the past few years, the BBC's budget by 2020 is expected to be more than one-third lower than in 2010.

The BBC has few options to try and recoup the lost funds, since the government has not allowed the licence fee to be increased beyond the level of inflation, and, at least on the UK-only channels, the BBC famously cannot air advertising. One of the few revenue-generating proposals likely to come into being is charging for BBC iPlayer, the online video-on-demand and live TV service that is currently free and, in what is seen as a loophole, does not require having a TV licence for viewing on-demand content. Other options include selling off properties, such as the $200 million deal the BBC made last year to sell a 49.9% stake in BBC America to AMC Networks.

Otherwise, additional cuts to BBC services loom. BBC Three, one of the BBC's TV channels in the UK, is already expected to go online-only next year in order to save money. Meanwhile, news from earlier this week suggested the BBC's 24-hour news channel in the UK could also go online and the BBC's online news output could be significantly pared back.

 

[TheBigA]

The funding plan is obviously dated, predicated on people buying new TVs, which obviously isn't a growth area any more. In fact, it seems to me moving BBC3 to online-only just makes the problem worse. They're going to have to examine different ways to fund the BBC, in the same way, record labels are looking for new ways to fund music development.

 

[blizzard59]

They're going to have to examine different ways to fund the BBC, in the same way, record labels are looking for new ways to fund music development.

Yes, something that has been thrown around in the UK is doing what Finland and Germany have done in recent years, which is turn the license fee into a tax that most everybody must pay, regardless of TV and/or radio set ownership. That covers up any loopholes whereby people aren't subject to paying the fee if they rely exclusively on the internet for consuming TV/radio content.