BBC red button: Corporation U-turns on plans to cut services

The BBC has u-turned on a plan to cut its red button interactive services, following intense criticism.

Late last year, the company said it would get rid of the text and data part of the service, arguing that it required significant financial investment and was holding back spending on other services.

But that decision quickly led to criticism from a variety of groups who argued that it would have a major impact on a variety of people, particularly the elderly and people with disabilities.

Now the BBC says it has found a way “to keep the most valued text and data elements of the red button service”.

It will still get rid of some of the services accessed through the red button: it will no longer provide Lottery results, and most sport news. Updates will also come less frequently, with changes not being made overnight.

But it will keep local, national and international news, the main sport headlines and stories as well as fixtures and results, and weather forecasts.

Red button video streams – used to give access to other broadcasts in major events such as Glastonbury and Wimbledon – will continue as normal, and were never threatened by the change.

The BBC will also make changes to the internet-based version of the red button, which can be accessed through smart TVs. The BBC News and BBC Sport apps will be removed, and so will the lottery and weather pages, with the content from those apps moved instead into the iPlayer.

Dan Taylor-Watt, the director of product and systems for BBC iPlayer and BBC Sounds, said that the u-turn had come after “extensive dialogue with a wide range of representative groups to build on our existing research into what elements of the service are most used and valued by different groups”.