Quote:
Originally Posted by pip08456
Who's saying a law needs to be passed to put the BBC behind a paywall.
All that needs to be done is scrap the license fee. How the BBC then raises revenue is then up to them.
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Because most people who argue against the licence fee, on this forum at least, lack the imagination to see beyond the subscription model. They perceive the licence fee as, in effect, a compulsory subscription, and therefore their argument boils down to “change the compulsory subscription into a voluntary one”. Voluntary subscription tv services require, by their very nature, encryption and a paywall.
Yet there is absolutely no way the BBC would adopt a subscription model without being compelled to do so. It simply isn’t the way public service broadcasting works, anywhere in the world, and it could not sustain an operation of the BBC’s size and present reach.
The only possible outcome of abolishing the licence fee would be a BBC that looked and acted much the same as ITV presently does. Free to air, funded by advertising and overseas sales. And the problem with that is that it would cause a massive devaluing of ad breaks on British TV, quite possibly putting a lot of smaller channels out of business.