BBC face issues with licence fee and iPlayer

There are growing concerns over the impact the BBC’s iPlayer is having on the broadcaster’s licence fee.

The current license fee, set at £145.50 until 2017, leaves the BBC with a 16% real-term cut to the £3.5 billion it receives annually.

The body that the BBC uses to collect the fee, states:
“You need to be covered by a TV licence if you watch or record television programmes, on any device, as they’re being shown on TV. This includes TVs, computers, mobile phones, games consoles, digital boxes and DVD/VHS recorders”

However: “No TV licence is needed if you don’t watch or record television programmes as they’re being shown on TV- for example, if you use your TV only to watch DVDs or play videogames, or you only watch programmes on your computer after they have been shown on TV.”

On-demand services such as the iPlayer where more than 15 million TV and Radio programmes are accessed each month, fall into that second category.

Despite the BBC estimating that 0.2% of adults use the iPlayer a week while watching no other live television, the launch of internet enabled TV devices, such as YouView (the BBC backed set top box that delivers programmes to the TV via broadband internet) allows viewers to create their own schedules through on-demand programming.

This sparks the argument that viewers are not watching live TV, but are using the providers catch-up service instead and therefore not meeting the criteria necessary for the purchase of the licence.

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