On 20 October 2026 the BBC announced that the BBC Three and BBC Scotland TV channels will close next spring and go online only and that Radio 4 Extra will close, as BBC News and The Guardian reported.
History. 2 of 9. ABC named its cuts 15 days after the warning in 2020, and the BBC named BBC Three about ten days after Tony Hall's speech in 2014. The other five lists took three months or more.
Hunch. BBC sources told Deadline on 23 September that closures could be announced as early as the following week, but the BBC has confirmed no date.
The one-month market resolves on the same test, with the announcement dated 25 September to 25 October 2026. A press report from unnamed sources does not count until the BBC confirms it.
We looked for cases where the head of a large public broadcaster, after the government cut or froze its money, said in public that audiences would lose something: a channel, a station, a language service or a news bulletin. We then checked whether the broadcaster later named what would go. We found nine cases since 2010, and in seven a list of cuts followed. Four of the nine are the BBC. The other five are Denmark's DR, Australia's ABC twice, the Dutch NPO and Austria's ORF, which are paid for by a licence fee or by the state in a similar way.