CCPSB

Richard Hooper; the chair of the selec­tion panel respon­si­ble for choos­ing the pre­ferred bid­ders for ITV regional news pilots in Eng­land, Wales and Scot­land; has told the con­sor­tiums bid­ding for the pilots to develop plans to oper­ate with­out funds from the BBC licence fee.
There are more details in Mark Sweeny’s arti­cle in the Guardian.

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Mem­bers of the House of Lords dis­cussed the sec­ond read­ing — main prin­ci­ples — of the Dig­i­tal Econ­omy Bill yes­ter­day. The dis­cus­sion included issues relat­ing to pub­lic ser­vice media. www.parliament.uk has a tran­script of the debate as well as full video and audio.
The bill will go to the com­mit­tee stage on 6th Jan­u­ary 2010.

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This month’s TUC (Trade Union Con­gress) saw a Pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing and copy­right piracy motion car­ried. The motion instructed con­gress to cam­paign actively against the top-slicing of the licence fee, and lobby for alter­na­tive fund­ing mech­a­nisms for pub­lic ser­vice broad­cast­ing, in par­tic­u­lar for the use of indus­try levies to ensure a qual­ity local and regional […]

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The chair­man of the BBC Trust, Sir Michael Lyons, has penned an open let­ter in which he claims the major­ity of the pub­lic is against the cor­po­ra­tion shar­ing the licence fee to sup­port fail­ing local news ser­vices. 
The Press Gazette has fur­ther details, or you can read a copy of the let­ter at the BBC Trust […]

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The switch-off of the ana­logue radio sig­nals could hap­pen sooner than indi­cated in the Dig­i­tal Britain report, accord­ing to Ofcom’s chief exec­u­tive, Ed Richards.
ElectronicsWeekly.com has full details of the story.

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