Why the BBC licence fee makes sense

A consensus seems to be forming that the BBC licence fee is for the chop. In a digital age, the reasoning goes, we should not be forced to subscribe to huge bundles of content, with no choice over what we pay for and what we don’t.

This argument, intriguingly, is both true and false at the same time.

What’s true is that technology has removed two constraints which made the licence fee necessary in the first place. At the BBC’s outset, the airwaves were limited, creating a monopoly. Moreover it was impossible to charge for specific content: anyone with a wireless set could freely enjoy anything on air. Other than advertising, a licence was the only option. Neither condition applies today.

Yet when people assert that competition from Netflix, Amazon Prime or Spotify make a licence fee indefensible, it is worth remarking that these upstarts succeeded by adopting a very similar model to, er, the BBC.