Thread: Switzerland votes on its TV licence fee
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Old 07-03-2018, 09:49   #15
OLD BOY
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Re: Switzerland votes on its TV licence fee
Quote:
Originally Posted by Matth View Post
What are the reasonable alternatives to a licence fee, that would be fairer to services that are not licence fee funded, but are dependent on having a licence?

1. Adverts - would compromise independence and probably impact ad revenue on other channels.
2. Subscription ... you pay, you get - you don't pay, you don't get... Undeniably fairer but would make obsolete any equipment lacking paid service handling.
3. A small public service operation from general taxation
There are other alternatives too, but I would favour the subscription model. There are currently issues about ensuring payment is made when you can receive these channels free to air, but we have that problem anyway wiith the licence fee. Ideally, this money would be collected by the pay tv operators, but it does leave a lot of people who don't have pay tv, although the task of checking that a subscription was being paid would be made a lot easier.

One possible solution would be for the free to air version of the channel to be funded by commercials. Those with pay tv would get the BBC channels free of ads. By the time the licence fee comes up for renewal again, the BBC will be well on the way to converting its channels to 'on demand/streaming' only, so that would make the two versions of BBC channels more straight forward to implement.

I wouldn't worry about the impact of ads on the Beeb impacting on other channels. If the predictions are correct, there will be fewer of these anyway in a decade's time.
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