[Keith]

I'm not sure anyone whose finances are *that* tight would be paying for a TV licence, and those pensioners who still get a free licence would qualify for social tariffed broadband as mentioned already (you need to be receiving pension credit).

as an example, BT does 40Mbit broadband and a landline with a few hundred minutes for £15/month, or in other words £5 more a month than their social tariff landline only service. You can have 80Mbps and unlimited minutes for £20.

if the very vast majority of people are using other means to watch TV, then that places a huge question mark over the future of maintaining the existing freeview transmission network, which is not a cheap endeavour. Presumably that is where Freesat comes in.

This rather assumes that everyone who watches live TV is paying the TV licence fee, though it could be argued that if they're not paying for it why should they be able to access it.

However, the cost of broadband was only part of my sentence. There is also the cost of replacing TVs or buying the tech to make them compatible to receive IP streamed TV. Whilst the likes of a Roku stick may only be under £30 per TV that can still add up if you have multiple TVs, and even if people can afford this they're likely to resent being forced to pay that.

Long term there may be an argument for all properties to have access to a basic 5-10MB/s internet connection for free, which would probably have to be subsidised by government. (Given more government and council services are going online I'd argue there's a reasonable case for this, however that's down to politics which is probably off-topic.)

I suspect it'll be a lot cheaper to do this than to maintain the national transmission network to current standards (might be an argument for keeping the main transmission sites going, but as for all those relays....)

If I recall correctly the transmission masts are currently used for things other than just TV transmission, such as radio and possibly also mobile networks. Naturally technologies can change quite a bit in a decade, however I'd have thought come 2033 the masts (and relays) would still be used for more than just TV transmission.