Of course, once we all own digital TV and radio sets the commercial sector will get much more picky about how the Beeb cross promote their digital services. Certainly the commercial radio sector see the BBC's continuing dominance among big chunks of the radio audience as a problem - and the need to better compete for that audience was one of the reasons used by major radio companies Capital and GWR for merging their operations.
Given the change in media ownership rules that came in with 2003's Communications Act, you might have expected more mergers in the radio sector in 2004. Actually, all was quiet on the radio merger front for the first half of the year, until rumours started to circulate that two of the majors would soon start talking consolidation. In the end it was Capital and GWR that announced an intention to merge. With the Office Of Fair Trading giving those proposals the go ahead this week, insiders now reckon 2005 will bring the consolidation in the radio sector many expected in 2004.
Perhaps one of the reasons the radio sector didn't have time to merge this year was because they were all too busy bidding for one of the new analogue radio licences that media regulator OfCom began to advertise. We may be in the digital internet age, but the real money is still in traditional broadcasting, and as each new licence became available most of the usual suspects and a handful of independent players could be expected to make a bid - the former usually putting forward a local version of one of their existing digital stations (for some reason, it always seemed to be a rock station). There should be more of the same in 2005 with many more of these licences still up for grabs.
Anything else? Oh yes, Johnny Vaughan took over on Capital's breakfast show to mixed critical and audience response. TalkSport's Kelvin MacKenzie continued to whinge about the way RAJAR measure radio audience figures (though he was unsuccessful in his attempt to sue RAJAR over it). Tony Blackburn walked out on his radio show after being told not to play so much Cliff Richard - but his bosses soon had to back down after Tony and Cliff won the support of the popular media - and good for them. And finally Xfm's Remix show launched a weekly e-newsletter update put together by the team at CMU. That was the biggest story surely.