UK Considers Making Netflix Users Pay License Fee to Fund BBC

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-28/uk-considers-making-netflix-users-pay-license-fee-to-fund-bbc

by marianorajoy

31 comments

  1. Yeah good luck with that, people will just cancel their existing licence or still not pay. I know I’d cancel mine out of principle. Can’t just keep taxing people. Make it pay to watch.

  2. Couldn’t read the article but I’ll cancel streaming services and take to the high seas before I pay another penny to the BBC.

  4. Well they keep changing the licencing fee conditions to make almost entirely unavoidable. I fucking hate Britain.

  5. What is this weird almost nationalistic obsession with the BBC? If it goes it goes.

  7. > The government is the early stages of examining how to overhaul the funding of Britain’s public broadcaster when its current 11-year charter ends on Dec. 31, 2027. Ministers are looking to either retain and alter the current television license fee model or scrap it and instead fund the BBC through alternative models such as taxation or subscription. That’s because viewing habits have changed as users gravitate toward on-demand services.

    So the headline is just one of a number of proposals being floated as part of this review. I guess the idea is that anyone “watching telly” should pay the license fee even if they’re only using streaming services. There may be some data that suggests that there’s quite a few people who claim to only watch Netflix, who in fact do occasionally watch BBC, ITV, C4 etc.

    It increasingly feels like, if you want everyone in the UK to contribute to the ongoing existence of the BBC/ITV/C4 as PBS services, then general taxation is the fairest way of collecting that.

  8. > we want growth

    > comes out with dumb ideas like this

    > wonders why we dont get any growth

  9. Gotta have money to shelter peadophiles. 

    Seriously bbc fuck off 

  10. Basically admitting that the BBC wouldn’t survive as a streaming service

  11. Well that’s one way to kill the streaming services in uk.

  12. Can anyone tell me why the BBC needs more money than the £5.7 billion it already gets to run this middle class gravy train.

  14. I willingly pay a license but I think this is too far. Independent streaming services should not be subject to the TV license

  15. I’m a big fan of the BBC but it’s not right that people who have decided to forego tv services and are paying for Netflix only have to pay.

    This is due to a large number of young people making this choice and part of that is because the BBC doesn’t really offer them much anymore compared to Netflix etc.

    The BBC needs to modernise and realise that the future is not a blank cheque. They can’t continue down the path of a traditional model and expect people to continue to bail them out.

  16. Zero chance in hell you’ll make the british public pay the bbc license fee to watch Netflix.

  17. People forget it’s not just TV, but radio, .bbc.com and 24hr news.

    They should better leverage their historical content and sell iPlayer as a subscription service everywhere.

    Even if it’s a bolt on to Netflix overseas. “For an extra $4pm get all BBC content”.

  18. How desperate are they for cash these days? It already irritates me how misleading the current ‘Do I need a licence’ checker they have is anyway. It **INCORRECTLY** states you must purchase a licence if you use YouTube, Netflix and Prime video which is simply not true.

    Even more so that it includes YouTube incorrectly given it’s user uploaded content. You telling me I need to pay a licence fee to watch any live broadcasts from creators on the platform? Get lost BBC, and I wonder how many pay under false narrative.

    I’ll simply pop my eyepatch on and sail the digital seven seas again, and spend the licence fee on a good VPN each year if they introduce this.

  19. Yeah, I would love to see them try and do that.

    The BBC is clearly getting desperate at this point, instead of just accepting the fact that a lot of people don’t need the BBC anymore to live their every day lives, They are now considering the possibility to force people to pay for the license fee for something that isn’t even live.

  20. They’re not though, really. Logically, it’s an option on the list, realistically, it’s going nowhere as an idea.

  21. But I don’t pay it because I don’t want it and don’t want to fund it.

    If it was worth the money I would.

  22. How would this work from a legal standpoint? Surely Netflix wouldn’t want another organisation to profit from their subscribers. This would at best harm Netflix’s user base.

  23. “Considers” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that click bait. There’s a wide range of ideas being floated, but just won’t happen.

  24. This country stays taking the piss. I don’t watch Terrestial TV, Live TV or listen to the radio. Why tf would I fork out to pay for a service, I don’t use?

  25. What about they first actually give an option for people living abroad to pay them to get access to BBC content?

  26. I stopped watching the BBC as a young person when they scrapped BBC Three and a huge amount of their youth-oriented programming back in 2016. Just another classic case of British companies not treating young people as serious customers/audiences, then wondering why they have no money ten years down the line. Had they done this in 2018/19 when Netflix didn’t suck, it would have worked and possibly re-converted lost viewers, but now we’re all cancelling Netflix/Spotify/Prime too.

  27. If I need to I’ll pay for a vpn to use my Netflix. Fuck off bbc

  28. I will cancel Netflix if they insist on making me pay a license fee. The BBC should not depend on a tax for funding; they should operate as a commercial business like Netflix and compete for subscribers.

  29. Fed up of the BBC covering US events like it’s important while ignoring Europe.
    I’d much rather know about what’s happening 21 miles away than 2100 miles!

  30. The “you don’t use any of our services but you’re going to pay tax on it anyway” position is pretty indefensible to be honest.

  31. The BBC is not a public service and we should stop treating it like it is. It’s a media company and has no business trying to extract money from people outside of the free market.

    Make the BBC a subscription based model and put advertising on their live channels. That’s how you modernise this archaic model.

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