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by takno 3671 days ago
The BBC makes a substantial proportion of their revenue, and therefore covers a large percentage of the cost of production, from international sales. This means that rather than it all being paid for and ready to give away you'd see at least 50% budget cuts for stuff like Doctor Who and quite a lot things which are multi-country collaborations between the BBC and other broadcasters would never see the light of day at all.
1 comments
davb 3671 days ago
And according to [1][2] from 2012 to 2017, the BBC will pay £1.10bn - £1.55bn to their contractor Capita to manage license enforcement.

A change in licensing model could result in cost saving in this and other areas, and not necessarily mean underfunded programming.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...

[2] http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/ss/Satellite?blobcol=urldata&bl...

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takno 3671 days ago
The Wikipedia article you quote states that as the possible earn-out over a 15 year period rather than the 5 year period you suggest. Overall collection costs as quoted in those documents are roughly 2.7%, which isn't wildly off what you might pay for credit card processing fees. I'm no great fan of the license fee myself (although I haven't heard of a compelling alternative), but cost of collection isn't a strong argument against it.
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davb 3671 days ago
You're completely right - I misread that period. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll leave my original comment so your correction still makes sense.

I do, however, think that a minimum of £73.3m per year (£1.1bn / 15yrs) is a disproportionately large figure to pay for license fee enforcement. I absolutely think that the high cost of managing the license fee infrastructure is a good argument against the model, and the removal of those overheads (and others) may offset a some of the lost revenue.

A change in licensing model and overall culture (which I do understand has been attempted several times in the recent past) might result in a more universally appealing BBC. I struggle to find BBC programming very compelling, particularly when compared with other domestic and international broadcasters. They always feel... out of touch.

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