Over a million people have stopped paying the BBC licence fee in the past three years…

Auntie is not in great shape these days, with revenues in terminal decline they have had to do a lot of cost cutting. The BBC is still stuck for how to stay relevant in the modern age of internet streaming. From the Guardian:

There are now 23.3m TV licences in force, a fall of 539,000 from a year earlier, according to the corporation’s annual report. It is significantly more than the 300,000 fall in licence fee payers recorded a year earlier. The pace at which households are opting not to pay the licence fee has been alarming BBC executives for months, with the annual report conceding a “steeper projected decline in licence fee sales”.

It comes amid huge change in the media that has seen the rise of streaming services and digital platforms such as YouTube. While 94% of people in the UK continued to use the BBC each month, fewer than 80% of households contributed to the licence fee.

The BBC is scrambling to make cuts that will result in as many as 2,000 job losses and about £500m in savings over three years. Major changes to the licence fee are being lined up to arrest its decline.

The BBC has also revealed that Stephen Nolan is their third highest earner on £430,000 last year. I am sure you will all send your congratulations to him.

Personally I never watch live TV anymore. These days I watch more YouTube than anything. Likewise with radio I listen to more podcasts or music on Spotify. I will say that if you have a smart speaker, the local radio station Eirewave is excellent. It plays a great selection of music, all ad-free. It can be tricky to launch, I find saying ‘alexa play eirewave radio’ tends to do it.

The core problem is that for young people the idea of a TV licence is completely bizarre. You may as well ask them for a beard and tattoo licence.

Most young people are watching TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, etc. and the idea of the government forcing them to pay some fee for a service they don’t use is anathema to them.

Also from the article:

There are signs that the fee will be expanded to include anyone who watches streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+ or Amazon Prime, with the fee potentially added to subscriptions for those services. While it is only one option being discussed, it appears to be the one with the broadest support. Brittin has said replacing the licence fee with a household levy would be simpler and easier to collect, but ministers have ruled this out, deeming it a new tax.

I’m not sure if this option will be much better as people are already getting fed up of having to subscribe to umpteen different streaming services. Already half the country seems to have a dodgy fire stick and putting a tax on all the streaming services is likely just encourage more people into the arms of the guy down the pub who can give them every movie, TV show and TV channel they could ever want for a fiver a month.

Brian O'Neill

Managing Editor of Slugger O’Toole. I help to manage Slugger by taking care of the site as well as running our live events. My background is in business, marketing and IT. My politics tend towards middle-of-the-road pragmatism; I am not a member of any political party. When not stuck in front of a screen, I am a parkrun Run Director.