BBC Alba
BBC Alba is a Scottish Gaelic-language free-to-air public broadcast television channel jointly owned by the BBC and MG Alba. The channel was launched on 19 September 2008 and is on-air for up to seven hours a day. The name Alba is the Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland. The station is unique in that it is the first channel to be delivered under a BBC licence by a partnership and was also the first multi-genre channel to come entirely from Scotland with almost all of its programmes made in Scotland.[1][2][3]
This article is about the BBC's Gaelic-language television channel. For general Gaelic-language services from BBC Scotland, see BBC Gàidhlig.Country
Pacific Quay (Glasgow) and Stornoway
19 September 2008
Channel 7 (SD)
Watch live (UK only)
Watch live (UK only)
As of 2012, BBC Alba had an average viewership of 637,000 adults over the age of 16 in Scotland each week.[4]
Criticism[edit]
English content and lack of Gaelic subtitles[edit]
The Gaelic community, including writers Aonghas MacNeacail,[24][25] Angus Peter Campbell,[26] Lisa Storey [26] and musician Allan MacDonald, have criticised the non-availability of Gaelic subtitles, and the emphasis on English-language interviews and reportage in the channel's content for adults.[27] Writers and authors were reported by the BBC Gaelic news service as setting up a campaign, GAIDHLIG.TV, to increase Gaelic content on BBC Alba. The decision to introduce 'red button facilities' to allow viewers to switch to English-language sports commentary, first announced in August 2014 for rugby and the Guinness Pro12 series, was heavily criticised by the Gaelic community.[28] The criticism resulted in MG Alba announcing publicly in the West Highland Free Press that the 'red button option' for English-language commentary would not expand to other sports or areas of the channel.[29]
Sports programming[edit]
Between its launch in September 2008 and the beginning of 2010, the BBC Alba channel lost a third of its viewers, but its number of viewers remains five times larger than the size of the Gaelic speech community in Scotland (just over 58,000[30]). The historian Michael Fry has argued that many of its viewers only watch it for the football coverage, because "you don't need Gaelic to watch football", and that in this way the channel is "cheating".[31] The model is, however, both common and intentional as it is on comparable channels such as the Irish language channel TG4, the Basque broadcaster EITB or the Welsh channel S4C. In Europe, these channels' main mission is not commercial, but the promotion of the original languages.
Freeview[edit]
Some criticism had been levied over the channel's addition to Freeview, primarily due to the BBC's original plan (with acceptance from the BBC Executive) to remove all 13 BBC Radio channels from Freeview for Scottish viewers over the period that BBC Alba will be shown on Freeview (between 5 pm and midnight); however the criticism has not been directed at the BBC's decision to extend BBC ALBA to Freeview in principle.[8][32] On 19 May 2011, it was reported that the BBC has backed down on the plans, after the BBC had "managed to reengineer facilities" to allow BBC Radio 1Xtra, 5 Live and 6 Music to continue to broadcast on a 24-hour basis.[33] The three stations were chosen because they have the highest evening audience ratings on digital television of the seven BBC radio stations unavailable on FM radio.[34] On 2 December 2013, it was confirmed that more radio stations were made available 24 hours in Scotland, but with some trade-offs.[35] BBC Radio 4, 4 Extra, 5 Live Sports Extra, BBC Radio Scotland and BBC Asian Network were restored, but as noted in the blog with some technical trade-offs, such as mono audio rather than stereo during the evenings on the radio stations mentioned and the audio bit rate of the TV channels in Scotland on Freeview reduced to 192 kbit/s from 256 kbit/s.