Media Guardian: More licence fee 'slicing' possible
Media Guardian: TV and C4 cross swords over funding gap

With a price tag of £300m, Ofcom's proposed new public service publisher has to be funded somehow, and it seems that the Television Licence might just be the way.

However there should be a bigger question asked about these proposals - why do we need it when we have two publicly owned, public service broadcasters already? Is there anything in these new proposals that the BBC or Channel 4 couldn't do already?

Indeed, logically you need to ask the question - do you actually need two seperate public service broadcasters anyway?

Which brings me on to last weeks "comment of the week" which comes from ITV's director of regulatory affairs, Christy Swords, who proudly proclaimed...

"I don't see any imminent threat to classic public-service broadcasting services on ITV1."

Which is of course why childrens programming has been reduced to as small a block as they can get away with, why ITV Productions have abandoned making any childrens programming.