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They really need to bite the bullet, scrap the licence fee and fund the BBC from general taxation. Gone are the days when only a fortunate few could afford to buy and watch a TV so it seemed to make sense then to have them pay for the privilege but not that reasoning no longer holds water.
The licence fee is excellent value for money.
It is indeed. Such good value it's left the BBC a sitting duck for further cuts in both income and control. And as the BBC is the lead representative of UK PBS broadcasting, and indeed the whole of FTA broadcasting, this is not good news for FTA viewers, regardless of whether they get their TV OTA or by catchup.
Maybe not. However, the BBC themselves have reported an expanding black hole in their finances as people catch on to the no licence fee if you watch it on catchup wheeze.
This loop hole has to be closed and quickly.
According to Steve Hewlett it's not that simple:
Meanwhile, the newly forecast £150m licence fee revenue shortfall was explained as being primarily a consequence of people exploiting the so-called “iPlayer loophole”: households claiming to watch only “catch-up” on-demand TV, and therefore not legally required to have a TV licence which is only necessary if you watch or record (any) TV as it is broadcast. On further inquiry the BBC was not able to give me any specific data to support this contention. All they actually know is that their previous estimate of the number of households predicted to buy a TV licence is now likely to fall.
The point of this part of the BBC’s announcement and the way it was expressed – in the very week of the decision to take BBC3 online-only – was two-fold. First, it wants to persuade the government that the legislation behind the licence fee needs modernising to take account of new forms of consumption – much of it promoted and pioneered by the BBC itself with its online and mobile offerings – all of which might be expected to make the problem worse. In other words, it hopes to close the “iPlayer loophole”. New culture secretary John Whittingdale is known to agree but the question of how to frame a licence requirement for all online catch-up viewing – should it include Netflix or YouTube? – is altogether trickier. The obvious answer would be to make BBC iPlayer access dependent on owning a TV licence but executives won’t go there, fearing the thin end of a subscription-funding wedge.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/05/bbc-cuts-job-losses-revenue-shortfall
He goes on to say:
But the other key aim behind revealing the projected £150m shortfall is to try to ward off any of the mooted suggestions for either reducing the level of the licence fee directly or of adding significantly to what the BBC is required to pay for. Off the back of a licence fee frozen since 2010 with hundreds of millions required to be spent on S4C, broadband rollout, World Service etc – amounting, Hall said recently, to a 26% cut in resources for its UK domestic public services – the BBC is rightly fearful of further costly incursions. Paying for over-75s’ licence fees instead of the government – £700m now and rising fast as the population ages – would, the BBC reckons, herald a catastrophe. From which only public affection and politicians’ fear of a backlash can save it. Which, to return to the start of the story, is why the BBC desperately needs to seize control of the “efficiency narrative” without which its enemies can, and no doubt will, make further cuts to its funding sound like a good thing.
Said catastrophe has since been confirmed, though with some significant sweeteners, apparently. Hewlett was on BBC News yesterday saying it could have been a lot worse. Time will tell.
| Tue 7 Jul 2015 10:17:03
#9 |
