Kenneth Burrell-CAPITA wrote:
Hi
Which is like paying income tax for Health Service and then having to
pay for prescriptions? ...
I can choose to go to Boots, or Tesco or one of any number of small
chemists to get the prescription. I'm not forced into going to a single
chemist, which may be inconvenient or costly to go to (or that I just
don't like, for whatever reason). And, unlike the licence fee, people on
low incomes don't have to pay prescription charges no matter where they go.
Can someone suggest a way of how you could efficiently and effectively
collect payment (s) that reflects all individuals use of BBC services
and programmes? Annual packages or subscription based on likes and
dislikes/hours viewed or listened/bbc web pages viewed/services
accessed/content downloaded/free concerts attended/freephone helpline
numbers dialed/...
You could extend the mechanisms used by adverterisers to gather ratings,
so that every household with a TV Licence gets one of those boxes they
use to monitor what people are watching/listening to combined with a
password to use the BBC website and linking it together with every
licence fee payers phone number so you know who dialed what freephone
number (though the privacy issues around such an idea are immense, and I
somehow doubt that it would qualify as efficient). You then use that
with charging model that uses per use pricing (like, 10p for an hour of
TV, 1p per kilobyte of data from the website).
Alternatively you could encrypt everything, and people could pay for
packages (like on Sky) - so you could just get news & documentaries and
childrens, while leaving out the sport. I don't think you could do it at
level of the individual (except for people who live on their own), only
for households, which is what the licence fee is currently targeted at
any way.
But then, both of those methods still leave the question - how do you
pay for the unpopular, but worthy, programming? If you are going to go
to a model where people only pay for what they like, then you're really
talking about commercial television.
Scot
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