Unit 9 AO1 BBC Costs of Production

Cost of programme production for the BBC

This information is dated from Janurary 2009.The BBC has been allocated £463 million of the licence fee money to fund their 16 radio stations. I will be looking at the costs for producing their content and the hourly long cost of running the BBC radio stations. The main costs are from their breakfast and drive time programmes compared to commerical stations. What also makes this expensive is the costs of presenters and staff. The breakfast time presenter was Chris Moyles and their drive-time presenter was Scott Mills. These programmes were two of the most expensive of the BBC.

Often, BBC are given a target by the BBC Trust of how much they are aiming to save every year from each department. During October 2007, following the new licence fee settlement, they made a clear goal to reducde their costs while maintaining the same quality of output.

 

This graph shows how much the BBC spend on their radio stations. The key at the bottom shows that the darker blue part on each bar shows how much they spend on the content on their radio stations.

Radio 4, BBC’s only speech orientated station will cost the most because it needs the most content. Unlike the other stations that play music, this station needs to produce more programmes to play on the station because they don’t have music to fill their schedules.

Radio 5 live however is the BBC’s station about sports. This would have been very popular during the Olympics 2012 however, the information from this graph was taken in Janurary 2009 so it’s slightly dated. Radio 5 is a station that are aimed at all ages and ethnic groups and their purpose is to give live sports coverage and to entertain their audience as well as get them involved by calling in and contacting the station.

Radio 5 Live Sports Extra, 1Extra, 6 Music, Radio 7 and Asian Network are all digital stations which are cheaper to run because they can only be accessed two ways; digital radio and online where as the other stations can be listened to from fm radios. These radio stations cost under £20,000 to run, where as the other non-digital stations cost beyond the £40,000’s.

The Nation Stations are for different parts of the UK. England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The BBC also have community stations that are only for small areas.

Radio Scotland: Supports Scottish music, culture and arts. Should commission new and established talent. Should broadcast styles of music making found and popular within Scotland

Radio nan Gaidheal: Should support Scottish and Gaelic music and arts and should commission work from new and established talent. This is basically scottish radio, in their language.

Radio Wales: Should support Welsh music and arts, and should commission work from new and established talent. It should boradcastmusic making found within wales.

Radio Cymru: Support welsh music and arts, and should broadcast a wide range of music

Radio Ulster and Foyle: Support music and the arts in Northern Ireland and should commission work from stablished and emerging talent.

The reason why some of the radio stations more per listener is because they all have different audience figures. Each station is allocated a different budget. Some may argue that the stations with the least listeners should get more money to attract a wider audience. However you could argue the same for a popular station like Radio 2 because they have a wide range of listeners and they need to keep up with the same style of content because it is what licence fee payers prefer over the BBC’s other stations. When looking at the graph, even though Radio Scotland, for example, cost more than £4,000 to run per hour and the cost per listener per hour is 3p the theory I have come up with is that the higher per cost per listener, the lower that radio stations audience is. My theory shows that Radio 2’s cost per listeners is 0 because it is the most popular station in the UK and they have so many listeners, to divide their allocated amount by their audience figures, they would be left with less than 1p per listener.