Your ok if you've got Sky sports but for those of us that haven't there's no Live F1 races to be shown from 2012... Just highlights only... Bloody BBC in conjunction with evil Rupert Murdoch... It Sucks Ass!!!!

 

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/29072011/58/fans-outraged-new-f1-television-deal.html

So lets do some math, say the average sky bill is around £70 a month (thats actually higher as thats basically all packages apart from either movies, or sky sports)

 

70 x 9million x 12 = £7,560,000,000

 

Now if everyone paid the BBC licence fee

 

which is £145.50

 

So 145.50 x 62million = £9,021,000,000

Licence fee is per household not person (basically). So let's look at the real figures which are publicly available.

BBC licence fee income for 09/10 was £3.56 billion. 66% goes on TV so that's £2.35 billion. The rest goes on national and local radio, website, iPlayer, transmission and fee collection costs. As of 2015, the licence fee will also have to cover S4C, BBC Arabic TV and BBC World Service which used to be paid for by the government.

For the year just ended (to June 11) BSkyB had 10.294 million subscribers with an ARPU of £539 so that makes £5.548 billion.

 

So roughly speaking, BSkyB has twice the income for half the number of subscribers/homes than the BBC. Or, to put it another way, they have four times as much to spend per home than the BBC. And that doesn't count the significant income they get from wholesaling channels to eg Virgin or the significant fees they charge other channels to be on the EPG.

 

They're a very successful company and have revolutionised TV but the subscription model (as opposed to licence fee) means that now they can afford to bid higher than just about anyone for just about anything. Last year's operating profit was over £1 billion. And if they have bought your sport / favourite show / movie you only have one choice: pay up (and give them more profit to buy more stuff) or don't watch it.

 

The traditional PSB model (BBC and commerical TV) has faults but at least its free to watch.