WHILE a provisional green light from Ofcom, the BBC's relatively new overseers, appears to be a good sign that the new BBC Scotland digital channel sure to be given the go-ahead, that outcome is not guaranteed.
Ofcom wants to speak to more people before it makes its final determination, particularly those in the broadcasting and screen industries who will be directly affected by the proposed channel.
Last night the regulatory body said it could still "approve, reject, modify or require further amendments to" the BBC proposal.
The BBC, of course, will hope this is the precursor to a full approval: it has already started recruiting specialist reporter positions, including politics and health, as well as researchers and other staff.
And while much of the stations output will be repeats, it has already started planning programming for the new channel too.
The competition assessment report released by Ofcom yesterday is full of detail, rather like its voluminous annual reports, and there are some interesting figures in it.
One point is that the new digital channel, while a significant development in Scottish broadcasting and perhaps even in the Scottish cultural and political landscape, will not be watched, the regulator thinks, by a lot of people.
Ofcom estimate that the new channel will attract between 1.65% and 3.65% of the viewers in Scotland in 2019.
This, Ofcom said in its assessment report, is "modest".
This figure compares to up to 22% for BBC One and 14.8% for STV, with both losing only fractions of percentage points of viewers to the new channel. The BBC, presumably, will hope these figures are higher, and in particular around the time of the new channel's news bulletin for Scotland, which is a key part of its reason for being.
The Ofcom report says "the overall effect on the revenues of commercial TV broadcasters is likely to be relatively small.
"As a result, we do not consider the BBC’s proposal by itself is likely to have an impact on the viability of commercial TV services in
Scotland or substantially affect the incentives of commercial broadcasters to invest and innovate."
One of the other considerations of Ofcom, how the channel would affect the BBC's powerful online news presence, is also instructive: it does not believe it will lead to a major expansion or "change in focus" in the BBC's news offering online.
This may be disappointing to BBC viewers in Scotland who wanted the new channel to be accompanied by more digital news gathering or online presence.
A "detailed staffing breakdown" given to Ofcom by the BBC says that only a proportion of the much-heralded 80 journalist posts created by the channel are in news gathering: the rest are in production roles.
Ofcom still has concerns about the proposal, it seems, mentioning the end of separate programming for Scotland on BBC Two, which will, it says, lead to a fall in Scottish audiences to this channel. The channel will also, it noted, affect BBC Alba, the Gaelic channel. It estimates it could lose up to 3.5% of its audience.
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