Facing an exodus of licence fee payers and calls for a boycott, the BBC is teetering on the brink of an existential crisis, says James Warrington in the Telegraph. Here’s how his article begins:
Tim Davie, the BBC Director General, was candid this week about the scale of the financial challenges facing the public service broadcaster.
Speaking ahead of the publication of the BBC’s annual report on Tuesday, Davie said: “We have been working extremely hard to get a budget that balances. The market for content is inflating rapidly … We’ve got all kinds of cost pressures.”
Those pressures were evident in the BBC’s latest financial results, which showed an £80 million drop in licence fee revenues – the broadcaster’s main source of income – to £3.7 billion.
This was driven in part by a Government-imposed freeze on the licence fee. More worryingly for the BBC, though, the number of households paying the levy dropped by half a million to 23.9 million – an acceleration from the previous year’s decline.
For executives in W1A, the exodus of paying viewers is nothing short of an existential crisis.
The decline has been fuelled by calls for a boycott of the licence fee, with campaign groups such as the Taxpayers’ Alliance branding the household levy “archaic and unfair”.
Another campaign, calling itself Defund the BBC, has raised concerns about wasteful spending and alleged bias in the broadcaster’s output, as well as its aggressive prosecution of licence fee non-payment, which disproportionately affects women and poorer people.
Patrick Barwise, author of The War Against the BBC, compares the increase in licence fee dodgers to the epidemic of middle-class shoplifting. “This is people freeriding on the basis that they think they can get away with it,” he says.
Yet there is a more fundamental shift that the corporation must contend with. Audiences – especially younger ones – increasingly feel they can do without the BBC’s output.
The BBC is used by 69% of Britons under 16 each week. That’s down from 72% the previous year and puts the broadcaster behind YouTube and Netflix. The declines for children under seven are even more acute.
Even BBC Sounds – a cornerstone of the corporation’s efforts to reach younger audiences – is struggling to gain traction. The number of 16 to 34 year-olds using the streaming service slipped to 585,000 last year, behind a target of at least 600,000.
Instead, younger viewers are turning to video-sharing platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. The BBC’s research found more under-35s watched global streaming services on average per week than U.K. broadcasters.
Worth reading in full.
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