Corporation understood to be looking into future of £66.2m TV channel and how live news is covered, with final decision yet to be made

The BBC is considering making its news channel online only following a similar cost-cutting move for its BBC3 TV channel, it has emerged.



Work had already started on assessing the impact of making the news channel online only before the government unveiled a surprise licence fee settlement on Monday in which the BBC will have to shoulder the full £750m cost of free licence fees for people aged over 75 by 2020.

A paper has already been put together about the £66.2m news channel, looking into its future as well as how the BBC covers live news in future more broadly, according to sources. A final decision about the channel has yet to be made.



George Osborne forces BBC to pay for over-75s' TV licences Read more

The BBC has been forced to act after it was told it would have to take responsibility for the cost of free TV licences for the over-75s.

The Tory peer Lord Patten called that arrangement “awful” and a “quick and dirty deal” to cut BBC services. He said that the corporation had been forced to accept the terms in order to ward off even harsher cuts in the future.

And the shadow culture secretary, Labour MP Chris Bryant, called on the culture secretary John Whittingdale to release the full terms of the deal.



“Licence fee payers need all the facts before we can judge whether this backroom deal is a good use of money,” he wrote in a letter.

Rolling broadcast news is expensive. In the last BBC annual report, it said the channel’s production costs were £26.8m, while its newsgathering costs were £21.2m.



In addition, the news channel spent £48.7m on content, £8m on distribution and £9.5m on infrastructure/support in 2013/14 and taking it online only would prove cheaper for the BBC, which is looking to make savings.

In a recent speech, BBC director of news James Harding said the reach for news channels is falling as people turn to new technology such as social media for their news.

“The BBC News channel is the most-watched 24-hour news channel in the UK, reaching 8.6 million adults each week. But like TV news more widely, the channel’s reach has fallen over the last three years, as has Sky’s.

“What do these figures say to us? They tell us that just as the BBC redefined the news for Britain – first on radio, then on television and more recently online – we must now consider very carefully the prospect that we may need to do so again.”



“Technology, once again, is transforming the way the BBC tells stories, the way everyone gets stories. In particular, it is changing the way people get breaking news. There is a shift from rolling news channels on TV to streaming news on mobile … This represents an opportunity as exciting as the launch of 24-hour news in 1997 and will force the BBC to think how best we reach people.”

When former BBC director of news Peter Horrocks ran the news division, he prioritised the channel over the main news bulletins by, for example, giving the channel control of resources such as satellite trucks if a big story broke.

But now insiders say the 6pm and 10pm news bulletins get first say on resources on major stories and that newsgathering staff say they have had it made clear to them by their boss Jonathan Munro that bulletins should have priority.



Staff working on the news channel have already been seated closer to their colleagues in world news and there have been suggestions internally that they may share more resources.



However, as the BBC looks into the idea, questions remain for the corporation about how it would react to a major breaking story such as a terrorist attack that needed to air on both rolling news and the main channels.

ITN scrapped its news channel in 2005 but the BBC has a different remit and viewers look to it at time of national events such as a royal death or other major news stories.

One suggestion that has been mooted is for a slimmed-down core team that could remain to cover major domestic stories for world news, but it is not clear how that would work.



The BBC declined to comment.

