Quote:
Originally Posted by OLD BOY
Yes, well the commercial broadcasters like to call the shots. They can’t have it all their own way. They don’t want the BBC to have the advantage of the guaranteed income from the licence fee but if that stops and they go commercial, they don’t want that either.
Cake and eat it?
---------- Post added at 11:47 ---------- Previous post was at 11:45 ----------
If the licence fee is abolished, then they will have to amend the charter, won’t they? Why is that so insurmountable?
If that’s what you think, I’m not sure what you were getting at in your last post.
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You're getting things backwards.
The BBC's Royal Charter is what enables the licence fee. You can't abolish the fee and then amend the charter to reflect that. You amend or abolish the charter, in order to abolish the fee.
In fact, the primary purpose of the charter is to enable the licence fee system. Otherwise the BBC could simply operate under exactly the same regulatory framework that governs ITV etc. So in practice if you intended to abolish the licence fee the royal charter would probably go at the same time.
The bigger question in terms of subscriptions is the BBC's public service obligations. ITV also has a PSO (as do channel 4 and 5); you don't have to have a charter to be a public service broadcaster, but you do have to commit to certain levels of availability, which going behind a paywall is not compatible with.
So by proposing a subscription you're also proposing the BBC stops being a public service broadcaster. For an organisation whose entire business is geared towards universal public service broadcasting the very idea is absurd. In fact the only reason 'force it to charge a subscription!' is ever advanced as an argument is because people see the licence fee and draw a shallow and false equivalence between it, and subscription. In the context of universal public service broadcasting the idea simply isn't compatible at all.