Tough times for the BBC, that has announced it will shed more than 1.000 jobs to address the growing shift of viewers to online which is estimated to cause a £150m decline in license fee revenue.
The competition from the demand for catch-up online services or from alternative providers such as Netflix, which has revolutionized the way in which families understand television, increasingly distancing it from the traditional model, weighs heavily on the accounts of British public television. According to the latest estimates by the British TLC market regulator Ofcom, in fact, only 50% of viewers aged between 16 and 24 watch live TV.
At the end of next year the entire funding model of the BBC will undergo an overhaul and could even change radically. Currently, UK television is mainly funded through public money, but soon, with the license fee frozen, the funding model could change.
Meanwhile, the staff reduction decided today will result in savings of 50 million pounds a year for the BBC. The positions most affected by the ax of the cuts will be above all in management and in the marketing and finance departments; other jobs will be eliminated by merging some technology departments.
