[tellyblues]

Making the licence fee or an equivalent of it mandatory whether people watch TV or not and it being likened to taxes that go to funding schools, hospitals etc is all very well if all what the BBC does and the content it provides can be deemed necessary. I'm not sure various presenters earning massive salaries is necessary or a good use of public money nor is content which is entertaining but does little in the way to educate and inform.

It's difficult for the BBC to make cuts because you could make a case for any service being beneficial to the public as the option is there for them to use it, and in some sort of Patch Adams way of thinking entertaining people makes happy people, but could all these services and the aims of BBC content as a whole be provided by spending less money? If the answer is yes, do it. If not because "we don't want to annoy people who won't watch Match of the Day if Gary Lineker isn't presenting", that isn't best serving the public and forcing people to pay for that attitude is unacceptable.

This isn't anything new from the BBC - it's been there for years but people being able to be watch stuff without having to pay the licence fee is affecting them too much now. Without making the BBC subscription only - and I doubt they'd want to do that anyway because they know most people wouldn't pay a fee if they had the choice - another option is the basic BBC service funded by the licence fee and content which can't be paid for by it put behind a paywall. The issue here is that with the licence fee being reduced (and it ought to really), would enough people pay the extra to make paywall content financially feasible? If not, the content already deemed superfluous should be scrapped, which is what should be happening now to cut costs.