Andalucía’s second, public TV channel will be closed down to cut costs. Its frequencies will, from October onwards, be used to transmit the surviving channel. The only difference will be that the old Canal Sur 2 frequencies will carry subtitles, sign language and audio-description for films.

The move was announced by the Director General of RTVA (Radio Televisión Andaluza), Pablos Carrasco, who made this surprise announcement at the beginning of the month. It will cut 20 million euros from the 2013 budget. The Director General, however, assured that this would not mean a loss of jobs.

“We have taken this decision for very simple reasons; we can’t afford to run two different transmissions,” he explained.

The fact is that on the 31st of July, this public-television board admitted that it was 34.3m in debt. Things were aggravated because the Regional Government cut the budget by 33% since 2009; i.e., from 180m euros to 122m euros. Couple this with a drop in advertising revenue dropped from 52.6m to 39m in the same period and finally, that they have a lot of outstanding bills owing to them from this sector. Bear in mind that the nation’s prime state television channels (TVE1 & TVE2) were ordered to stop accepting advertising, which meant that all their old customers moved to private channels and public regional ones.

For all of these reasons, Sr. Carrasco explained, it was impossible to balance the books by just putting austerity measures into place, even though such austerity measures already taken will reduce costs by 60m before the year is out.

Some of the other cost-cutting measures have been a reduction in salaries in the upper echelons of the public company by 25%, and a reduction in the purchase of programmes from independent producers.

Sr. Carrasco, however, argues that Canal Sur receives a lower budget than other regional broadcasting companies and says that he will continue to demand a budget to cover his 1,600 employees.

However, the opposition parties are not happy (no opposition party, of any political colour, ever is). The conservatives say that other kinds of cuts could have been made, such as reducing the number of executive posts, by cutting them completely or amalgamating them. The criticisms from the other side of the political spectrum, the IU, was that the decision was not consensual.

Finally, back in the days when Spain had just one channel, everybody in retrospect agrees that it was far superior in quality and balance that modern times with so many channels to chose from. It is, one can suppose, a bit like the accurate observation that food-rationed, wartime Britain never had a healthier, more balanced, national diet.

(News: Sevilla, Andalucia)