Today is the day when the small minority (~2%) of UK households which watch recorded (catchup), but not live, BBC TV programmes using iPlayer have to pay the annual £145.50 licence fee. If that estimate is correct this should lead to an £80m windfall for the UK’s leading public broadcaster, although I suspect the Beeb’s accountants will not be waiting up overnight to check the bank balance. The new rules will be very difficult to enforce but will no doubt be promoted heavily on the BBC’s various outlets.
Our ConsumerMetrix survey recently interviewed 1023 UK residents and found only 40% of people agreeing with “iPlayer licence fee”. 47% either disagreed with the new fee, or oppose the licence fee altogether, and 13% had no opinion. Perhaps surprisingly opposition is highest not in youngest age groups but in the 35-44 group, where 56% oppose the fee. More predictably, lower income households are more likely to object to the new fee – more than half of sub-£30k annual income households disagree compared to 38% of those earning more than £30k.


We will be publishing more detailed results from our survey of attitudes towards BBC funding shortly.

David Mercer