Lord Hall of Birkenhead is feeling pretty bullish about the quality of the organisation he leads. “We’re not Netflix, we’re not Spotify. We’re not Apple News,” the BBC’s director general will apparently tell the Royal Television Society on Thursday. “We’re so much more than all of them put together.”
To which the obvious answer is: if you are so confident that the public loves your product, then why are you so frightened about exposing it to commercial competition?
Surely, Lord Hall would be relishing the opportunity to get rid of the tax on TV-ownership which funds the BBC and fund itself in the way that all other TV and radio stations have to do – from subscriptions or advertising.
Yet funny enough, Lord Hall doesn’t want to do this – describing it earlier this year as ‘the wrong model’ for funding the BBC.
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