UKHamlet's Blog

BBC Broadcasting House - turned into apartments for the wealthy?

There’s an idea being floated in the ranks of power that the BBC should be made to pay its own way. The concept is that through its own endeavours, the BBC should fund its activities and perform as a commercial organisation would have to. I disagree and I’ll tell you why.

If the BBC had its 40p a day public funding removed, it would have to fight for revenues in the shrinking market of advertising, it would have to ramp up its commercial output, it would have to cut costs and it would have to change its output to meet the demands of a commerce. Not such a bad thing you might think. You would be wrong.

According the BBC’s 2008-2009 annual report its income is derived from the following sources:

• £3493.8 million in licence fees
• £775.9 million from commercial business
• £294.6 million from government grants
• £41.1 million from other sources such as overseas sales

Recently, it was reported that Internet Advertising had overtaken television advertising, with a record of £1.75 billion spent in the first six months of 2009. So, we’re talking about a comparable period. Extrapolating from that, making the assumption that advertising spend remains constant at this record level, we can assume that the Internet will generate £3.5 billion in advertising revenues in year. This is roughly the same as the cost of the licence fee and more than the total spend on television advertising. So, for the BBC to replace its licence fee with advertising, it would have to take ALL the advertising revenue from the ITV companies and then find some more.

Continue reading

Tony Blackburn

The Digital Switchover for TV appears to be in full swing and generally it appears to the consensus that this is a good thing. That’s another debate, but more concerning to me is the momentum being gained by the Radio Switchover proposed for 2015. It seems a long way off, but it is only five and half years away. If government has its way then at some point in 2015 all car radios, analogue hifi radios, the radio you have in your kitchen, your clock radio and so on, will become scrap.

Let’s just take the car radios. There are more than 35 million cars in the UK, with slightly smaller numbers in most European countries and slightly more in Germany. There’s about 200 million in the USA. In 99.9% of these cars there are analogue radios and for the foreseeable future car manufacturers will continue to pump out cars, vans and trucks with analogue radios.

Continue reading