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[1] I actually don't think it makes a blind bit of difference if people sell a pound of jam instead of 454g or whatever. I don't think pubs need to stop selling Pints either. Hard to be outraged here.

[2] TV stations are dead. Sell them all.




Channel 4 required no money to operate. It was making money for the taxpayers. There's no reason to sell it.


It is losing revenue YoY (afaik?) along with diminishing relevance in a world that doesn't revolve around a small number of channels providing mass market content.

(Free depends whether you view the license fee as a tax, and whether the free license for pensioners is costed).

The main reason to sell it is simply a question of "is it fulfilling a societal good unavailable via a private enterprise". If not, the Government has no place owning it imo.


Just because Nadine Dories drunkenly talks nonsense about Channel 4, to an extent that she makes her cabinet colleagues look like geniuses in comparison, you don't have to believe her. Here's a snippet from Wikipedia for example, plenty of other sources are available:

"As of 2022, it breaks even in much the same way as most privately run commercial stations through the sale of on-air advertising, programme sponsorship, and the sale of any programme content and merchandising rights it owns, such as overseas broadcasting rights and domestic video sales. For example, as of 2012 its total revenues were £925 million with 91 per cent derived from sale of advertising."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_4

They get no money from the license fee, from taxes, nor from the government. Except when the government chooses to spend tax money buying and spaces on TV, which would be no different to private companies selling ads to government.


Why is the license fee relevant in a discussion about Channel 4?


I thought all content termed as "public service broadcasting" was given specific funding. A quick google suggests it is a term/requirement of having the channel at all, rather than actually funded?

I can twist my logic to argue charging for the channel with requirement for Public Service Content costs money etc, but would be dishonest xD


If you're an American you will probably be astonished to discover that the US has several Public Service Broadcasters, you might know them as "the big networks", if you're old enough you might remember receiving them, especially in poorer households by just purchasing (or renting) a TV set and there they are. No subscription, no cable feed, everybody can receive them.

They use a public resource (the radio spectrum) to broadcast television, in exchange for access to this spectrum the government sets requirements on what they can broadcast and so they are not simply ordinary for-profit companies.

If you think back to the last time you heard about the Eurovision Song Contest, the reason Eurovision exists is PSBs. The right to broadcast TV in European countries is held by a large number of distinct PSBs. The reason the ESC has weird breaks in it, if you watch it as a pristine video rather than from a source which makes that obvious, is that it's intended to be broken up with lots of commercials in most countries where - just like a US network, the PSBs are actually for-profit entities just under constraint of law because they use this scarce public resource.

Most of the Eurovision members have requirements on proportion of local content (no trouble in the US, but a for-profit Greek company may find English language sitcoms bought from North America, Britain or Australia are cheaper than making their own), news or current affairs coverage (the actual news isn't profitable since you can get that anywhere, so a profit seeking entity would rather not have a nightly hour-long news show), and children's programming (not very profitable in most European countries since advertising to children is very heavily constrained as kids are easy to manipulate).


Correct: it's public service without being public-funded. Channel 4 is ad-funded but because they're publicly owned they don't have turning a profit as the central reason to exist. That almost certainly would change if they were sold.


They are also required to commission content from small UK producers, so privatising them will likely have a knock on affect.


Channel 4 didn't receive any money from the TV licence.


[2] several citations needed.

The danger is they're not dead, they're alive and well with a large part of a voting population.

Terrible idea.

As is [1]. Let's spend money for no reason, and also it makes it harder to integrate with the outside world, where the money London needs to launder is




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