As an American I would gladly pay such a fee if it meant we had a system like the BBC. We do have our public television and radio (of which some amount of the budget comes from public dollars) but it has constant funding drives, re licenses much material from places like the BBC, and is typically only one station per broadcast region (as far as I understand it - at least in my region). The UK should rightly be proud of what the BBC is, regardless of funding source.

Seems you quite like the idea of socialism??....

Just a friendly reminder that I will instantly close accounts when the political insinuations start to fly.

Back to the topic at hand, please!

If you like Classical that is.

If you have a look at the listings you will see that is simply not true. A wide range of serious and popular styles are covered, and mention has already been made of the many commissioned works which cannot, by definition, be "classical."

Fol-de-rol?

and what a lot of people world wide forget is the research and testing that the BBC does, I get to converse with the people who do this testing and they give me settings for use on my HD cameras and have defined standards for SD, HD and super HD that are used world wide!

20 million households in the UK pay £3.5 billion per year through the licence fee and watch BBC TV 32% of the time. Half of them also spend £5 billion on Sky TV subscriptions which account for 8% of total viewing. In addition TV advertising costs us all £3.5 billion per year, which we pay indirectly through the goods we buy.

On that basis you could argue that the BBC is fourteen times better than the cable alternative (it’s watched four times more and costs 3.5 times less). And that doesn’t take into account BBC radio.

Just a friendly reminder that I will instantly close accounts when the political insinuations start to fly.

Back to the topic at hand, please!

Whoops!

Just a thought about TV adverts... Doesn't everyone use those hard drive recorders like the 'My Sky' and 'Sky Plus' boxes that make it so easy to fast forward through the adverts? And isn't it easier to download your favourite TV shows and view via a media player? The cheap as chips Blu-ray player I bought last year came complete with USB socket, and worked heaps better than the WDTV Live box I used to use. Apple TV, Netflix, and aren't Google getting into streamed TV as well?

I did wonder what proportion of the Beeb's revenue comes from the TV license, and how it compares to revenue from overseas sales of its programs. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia had a full account, and a large majority of its revenue does indeed come from the TV license.

BBC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Revenue)