Alan Partridge, The Thick of It and Veep creator Armando Iannucci calls for the BBC to adopt a new subscription model in order to make more money.
In an interview with the Evening Standard, he suggested that subscriptions are the future for the BBC, dismissing the licence fee as something irrelevant to online television viewers:
The BBC should make a mint from the brand internationally. It needs a new attitude that says it’s not filthy to make money. As for the licence, you have people on laptops saying: ‘What is a television?’ There will be a subscription model.
Having been asked to clarify his idea, he has just this morning written a series of tweets outlining his proposal:
The BBC would make a fortune if it ran as a subscription service abroad. It’s revered across the world, and rightly so.
It’s also on cracking form. ‘In The Flesh’, ‘The Wrong Mans’, ‘The Fall’, etc, are part of a world class output.
Money made from subscriptions abroad would fund even better programmes at home and take pressure off falling license fee collection.
If the international model works, BBC could replace license fee at home with a subscription fee, set lower than current license fee.
Current exemptions would still apply. So no one would pay more for a subscription than they do now for a TV license.
The subscription would give you access to BBC archive too. We’d get a quality service at home, by ruthlessly selling ourselves abroad.
And he concluded his radical rethink of the BBC’s business model thus:
#bbc And now here’s a picture of my dog pic.twitter.com/UPyD7lcMxm
— Armando Iannucci (@Aiannucci) June 3, 2014
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