Sunday, January 26, 2020

Alternatives

You'd expect the BBC to have gamed many alternatives to the licence fee over the years. There's nothing in it for them to come forward publicly at the moment - it would be like offering your neck to Dracula.

But there should be a new forum where they could be discussed without current and immediate threat to the BBC we know today. For that to be a safe space, it needs a long timetable, and I would suggest pinning it to the Government's delivery of broadband.

"We intend to bring full fibre and gigabit-capable broadband to every home and business across the UK by 2025."

Technically, these terms are rather loose, and delivery is unlikely to be on time. Might they support the streamed-delivery of the Public Service channels currently on Freeview by Internet Protocol ? Certainly recent experiments by BT showing clusters of Premier League matches suggest it's increasingly possible, with the impending spread of 5G mobile easing the process. A sensible government would keep DTT Freeview going, as a method of communications as valuable as radio at times of national crisis. But a general shift to IP would free up frequencies, which generally gives Governments nice cash windfalls.

If you move public service broadcasting funding - at least mentally - away from a household/family model, to individuals, what existing support structure could you use ?

Everyone over 16 in this country is allocated a National Insurance number. Contributions from young and elderly are limited, but 94.9% of NI income comes from PAYE.  As a whole, it raises some £143bn every year.

BBC current licence fee income is just over £4bn a year, paid in by the bill-payers in 26 million households. Shift £3bn of that on to NI - a 0.6% rise would deliver - and most of the 53m population over 16 could get access to IP provision of a core public service broadcasting operation by some clever use of their NI number plus a password or two. The BBC could then make a business decision to raise, or not, £1bn via some form of premium subscription - they'd need 10m subscribers paying £100 a year (£8.30 a month) to deliver £1bn.

There'd have to be a new body charged with setting the annual amount to be delivered from a NI Public Service Broadcasting Fund (for gawdsakes not Ofcom), and the BBC would have to describe its £3bn offer pretty carefully before we started.   

Riddles with holes, I'm sure, but worth a thought from Dom in a break from perusing 35,000 applications from weirdos.

1 comment:

  1. The Beeb had the opportunity to do all this many years ago by simply getting Capita to send out PIN numbers with the tv licence - then certain bits of iPlayer content would only be available to fully paid up telly licence holders.

    The BBC chose not to.

    ReplyDelete

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