Sorry seems to be the hardest word
Some of the papers this morning – The Telegraph, The Independent, and the folk over at - have been reporting that the 91Èȱ¬ has apologised for there being too much sport on 91Èȱ¬ One last Saturday. This has, in turn, produced plenty of blog comment saying "why apologise for a great day of sport?" So I thought I'd better explain what's going on!
As the full statement makes clear, we believe the scheduling last weekend was right. is tremendously popular and the game had a peak audience of 7m - so absolutely worth its place in the 91Èȱ¬ One Saturday night schedule. I've just done a phone-in on Radio 5 Live where most of the callers emphatically agreed.
On the weekend of 8 and 9 March we'll be scheduling even more sport: and three FA Cup quarter-finals - and through 2008 there will be a number of occasions when sport dominates a particular part of the schedule. and are the obvious examples in a great year of sport, but we also offer hundreds of hours on terrestrial television of and other regular events such as and . These major events don't happen every day, obviously, but when they do we make the most of them.
Now, one of the great benefits of sport being on 91Èȱ¬ One is that it gets huge audiences and it's on the nation's most popular channel. It does, of course, have to take its place alongside , and and all the other genres - and in the 91Èȱ¬ we recognise that one man's meat can be another man's poison! Some people don't like the rugby and won't appreciate football displacing the regular schedule in the summer; while other people don't like soaps and think we should spend the money instead on expanding our portfolio of sports rights. As ever, we try to strike a balance.
It's worth saying that sport will always have a smallish core of people who will absolutely never watch it come what may - but the number of people who do watch it massively exceeds that. A will reach getting on for 90% of the entire population, and events like the or were watched by a total of 33 million each. It's part of the 91Èȱ¬'s stated objectives that we should provide these kind of events to viewers across the UK, and that's why we spend the licence fee on the best range of sport we can within a finite budget.
One question arising - in a from John Plunkett and again on 5 Live this morning - is whether the solution to this is a dedicated sports channel. We think not, because we want to put the best of the Six Nations and the and on a mass audience showcase channel. As I've blogged here before, we believe the best way of supplementing that is by our range of digital services. So this summer you'll be able to watch extended coverage from Beijing on up to seven streams of interactive television, on our website, on the 91Èȱ¬ iPlayer, on our HD channel, and on too. This seems to us a better idea than one old-fashioned linear channel, and it remains our pledge that we'll provide more sport content in the coming years - especially as we get closer to - and it'll be delivered where and when you want it.
