The streaming future of the BBC

By Brian Clegg

I enjoy listening to former BBC executive Roger Bolton’s Beeb Watch podcast, but there’s one point he has made many times when discussing the future of the BBC, and how it should be paid for, that always grates. 

At the moment, the BBC is paid for using a licence fee, a clumsy mechanism where an annual fee of £174.50 (£14.54 a month) is supposed to be paid by everyone who watches it. This is backed up by prosecutions for a criminal offence if it is not paid, where individuals are caught. Everyone agrees this isn’t a great way to go forward, but not on what should replace it.

Broadly, four options are suggested: advertising, general taxation, a levy on (say) broadband, or a subscription. (Some suggest hybrids, e.g. a levy for news, but subscription for entertainment, but this isn’t important in this discussion.) Few want advertising – this is not just viewers, but also channels like ITV, which would lose a lot of income. There is concern about general taxation, as it would suggest the government had control over the corporation. But of the two other options, Roger Bolton has a specific objection to subscription.

He argues that subscription implies moving to a full streamed service. Realistically, at some point this is bound to happen, but his suggestion is that it should not occur until the mid-2030s at the very earliest. Bolton’s argument is that at the moment not everyone can get to the internet, so this would prevent universal access.

I thought it would be interesting to look at the statistics here. How many households in the UK can’t access the internet… and most importantly how many can’t access the BBC via the aerial. With some admittedly quick searching it seems that around 50,000 households can’t currently get wired internet access fast enough for streaming, while around 400,000 households can’t access TV through an aerial. This surely totally shatters the ‘not universal’ argument. Access is already not universal.

There are two potential ‘what about…’ objections to this view. Firstly, most people who can’t access TV through an aerial can get to it, admittedly at more cost, via satellite. But guess what – most people who can’t get broadband through a landline can get to that via satellite.

The potentially stronger argument is that there are between 1.5 and 2 million households without internet access. These are not homes that can’t access the internet, but that don’t, and so couldn’t stream the BBC. However, this isn’t a useful universality argument. A similar number of people don’t have a TV at all – but we don’t consider them, because it’s a matter of choice, not restriction. Of course, internet access is not free, so you can make an affordability or technical capability argument, but again this is an issue of support for those in poverty or digital illiteracy, not a suitable reason to avoid moving to streaming.

Sorry, Roger, but you’ve got this one wrong.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.