We asked two media experts about the challenges and opportunities facing the new BBC channel. Here's what they said.

David Hutchison, Visiting Professor in Media Policy at Glasgow Caledonian University:

The origins of this project is the Scottish Broadcasting Commission. Set up by the first SNP minority government, it suggested a new channel should be established. Not a BBC channel, but a new channel that would cost £70 million. Even £70m, it said, would impose limits on what could be done. Especially when it comes to drama.

So, what’s odd about where we’ve reached is that the budget is just over £30m. Most observers would say that’s only a beginning. If we’re to have a channel with programmes holding their own against competitors, money isn’t everything, but you need a reasonable amount of cash.

At the time, virtually every MSP said it was a great idea, but they didn’t collectively say “and by the way, here’s £40m”. Sometimes Scottish policians will an end, but not the means.

People point to Spain and Catalonia. Catalonia has its own channels. We have a history. Britain has been a very centralised society, and we’ve moved into a kind of quasi-asymmetrical federalism. There are institutions like the BBC which I don’t think have quite grasped, in London, how Britain has changed. There’s an ongoing educational process.

That lurked behind a lot of the recent issues with the BBC. I would have thought the best way to deal with the issue of the news would be to say to the BBC in London, “okay, we want the 10 o’clock slot. Even if we’re competing with London. Because that’s the best slot, we don’t want to compete against drama. We want to offer an alternative to the 10 o’clock news.” I expect there would have been a serious argument between London and Glasgow. In time, the whole issue of the scheduling of that will have to be addressed.

But, for a lot of viewers, news is only one thing – they’re interested in documentary, drama, light entertainment. If you look at the schedule outlined, they’re trying to do thesethings.

They’re also doing, in effect, a Scottish version of Question Time. I would hope they do rather better than Question Time has in recent times. It has become rather gladiatorial and not awfully informative, in my judgement. It’s desirable to have that kind of programme, but in which people expand on their political ideas in a reasonably civilised way. It’s desirable to have that kind of programme, but I would hope the BBC Scotland version is better.

It’s going to be tricky. The show can’t afford to tour Scotland. They’’ll have to work hard to ensure participants come from a wide geographical area – you can envisage a slightly comic situation where people are getting into minibuses and ferries for Question Time. But running a channel with this budget, you can’t do all the things you want to right away.

One thing that needs to be said is that the BBC here has demonstrated its ability to run a news programme which deals with Scotland, the world and the rest of Britain. That’s what they do on Good Morning Scotland on Radio Scotland. Saturday morning is an excellent example.

If that approach can be reproduced – though perhaps not some editions of the 6:30pm programme – it will be good.

I’m glad we’re here. I’m hoping we can make a go of it. But this is just a stage on the process.

Neil Blain, Professor Emeritus of Communications at the University of Stirling, said: 

There’s a background to this development, and that’s Scotland being terribly underprovided with news and current affairs media. In the Irish Republic, you have five or six television stations located in Dublin (with a lot of collateral economic spinoff).

It would be ungenerous to criticise a venture when it’s better than no venture, but the budget is not adequate. If you want a competitive channel able to import programming from where it might want to, such as Scandinavia, you probably need two and a half times that.

Donalda MacKinnon has said it’s adequate… and I suppose you would say it is, for what they’re planning. But is that the kind of channel we need?

And the other question is the constitutional one – is this going to be more of the same? A lack of sympathy towards constitutional change in Scotland?

One of the reasons that the Scottish Broadcasting Commission wanted a channel done by someone who wasn’t the BBC was so that it would be more independent of Westminster.

What we’re seeing with Brexit is that the BBC is very nervous – it has come under a lot of justified criticism of running scared of the Tory government, and so to be successful, this new channel will have to look different.

One of the things the BBC can take refuge in is that people on both sides accuse it of bias on Brexit. If both sides accuse us, they can say they’re doing something right. In Scotland, there has never been a myth developed to the effect that the BBC is pro-independence. This is the big challenge for the BBC when it comes to Scottish affairs.

We’ll know soon whether, when push comes to shove, it has independence from the BBC in London.

Should there be disappointments with this channel, the fault will probably not lie in Pacific Quay but in the structure of the BBC.

The Question Time row came at a bad time, reinforcing what a lot of people thought the BBC’s position on independence and the BBC.

I think the problem is that the editorial line that BBC Scotland have taken on constitutional issues has not been clearly differentiated enough from most of the Scottish press – there are days in which Scottish newspapers are running an identical front page on SNP tax hikes, or whatever else. People seem not to observe the same alignment with the majority of the Scottish press on political issues with STV.

When it comes to drama and entertainment, the Scottish Broadcasting Commission recommended a different broadcasting body to the BBC to increase the range of patrons. If you’re an independent company in Scotland producing TV just now, you’re mainly looking at the BBC or Channel 4. I did my first public meeting on the future of Scottish broadcasting at the end of the 80s. It must be said I’m a big fan of BBC Alba, and there are opportunities for partnership there.

My own view is that grab whatever you’ve got, get something p, and if it works, argue for it to be better funded in the future.

It might hamper the launch of another channel in the future. Quite a lot of Scottish people are already sceptical of the quality of Scottish broadcasting – I think that’s outrageous. There is a lot of very good Scottish-originated programming people don’t know is Scottish. The negativity may be more a deep-lying psychological problem. I can’t understand what other nation in Europe would be disparaging about its own parliament the way people in Scotland are, but there is a group of people who talk about the shortbread, pretendy parliament.

We’re very apt to do it – glorify in failure. But I would like to be positive and hope it gets off to a good start. If people have problems with it, it’s important to get out that it’s struggling with a budget. We have cultural talent all over the country, it’s inconceivable this could fail with the right budget.

My fear is that people don’t understand that this isn’t a level playing field.