Money for nothing
Channel 4 not to get instant cash, rules Ofcom
To summarise, there's nothing revolutionary or unexpected about Ofcom's latest proposals. Channel 4 is currently in no financial crisis so alternative forms of funding will have to wait (though as usual that misses the point entirely), and Ofcom wants to be involved if the BBC wants to launch new services (BBC Three and Four involved government consultation so it's just a request for a formal agreement).
But what's more interesting is an issue which hasn't been widely debated so far; it's the tough question of "Where will the money for PSP funding come from"? One politically contentious idea is for the licence fee to be raised, though whether the public will be happy paying significantly more for minority programmes that may never get a wide audience - as opposed to funding the BBC - remains to be seen.
On the plus side, raising PSP funding via the licence fee might help to deflect criticism of the fee as being a "BBC tax", but a significant negative factor is that this may lead to a long term erosion of the licence fee as a means of supporting the BBC, especially if subscription services are introduced. And that in turn may lead to a backdoor privatisation of the BBC by stealth.
