TV licence is unwieldy way to fund RTE

On September 1st, 1972, a victory for the obvious over the anachronistic took place when the requirement to buy a licence for a "sound broadcasting receiver", a radio, was abolished. Twenty six years later, in 1998, 11,831 people paid £52 (€66) for a "monochrome licence" for their television. It seems incredible that there are so many people still with black and white TVs, and more so, that so many are prepared to pay the licence for them. (The dastardly thought occurs that many of these apparently compliant TV viewers could actually be watching a clandestine colour set.) A total of just more than one million TV licences were paid for in 1998, raising approximately £65 million for RTE. The license fee is collected by An Post, under contract to the Department of Arts, Culture the Gaeltacht and the Islands, for the benefit of RTE exclusively.

The cost charged by An Post for collecting the licence was £7.47 million in 1998. This is a very high cost to collect £65 million, even if An Post is the most efficient possible gatherer of the licence fee (a tax). An Post has 1,900 branches, various payment systems, some inspectors, and advertising costs to meet. It has, it claims, exceeded the targets for collection of licence fees set by RTE for 13 years in a row. Still, the efficiency of An Post's cost has not been tested by putting the contract out to tender.

Speaking of ads, the present campaign - "we've got you counted", you horrible TV cheat - is some distance from the older campaign showing vans testing areas for TV spongers. Everyone remembers those ads. The awful truth, according to An Post, is that there were no such detecting vans. There was no special equipment to detect whether you were watching a TV and whether TV radiation was being emitted from deep in your living room corner. The vans and the aerials were a mere device to frighten us into paying the licence. If any vans existed, they were for show only, a bogey man for us recalcitrant children.

So, how are you being counted? Every retailer of TVs is obliged to send the name and address of the purchaser to An Post. If you ever bought a TV licence in the past, you are on file. But if you buy a TV second hand or outside the State? That seems to be a way to avoid detection of your TV sponging.

The TV licence collection system is a very strange way to raise money for a public service. According to RTE, this system is in place in all members of the European Broadcasting Union. Can they all be wrong? Perhaps not, but they will all be subject to the force of rapid change in technology which is going to call into question what broadcasting is, and what public service broadcasting is, in particular.

RTE radio is available free for reception by radio. It is also available free for reception by a wired connection to the Internet. There is essentially no difference, except that Internet connection and the appliance used to access it is much more expensive. It seems inevitable that TV "broadcasting" will follow this pattern, and that the cost of accessing publicly broadcast, digital, information via the Internet will fall. The convergence between computers and TVs is finally on the way. In this scenario, it will begin to look ridiculous that one has to pay £70 per annum for a TV licence but nothing for a computer.

This is not to say that there should be no such thing as public subvention for some type of broadcasting. But we shouldn't focus on the mechanics of how programme content gets to us, by radio signals or by wired communications. With the coming technology, one can still less assume that "public service broadcasting" is produced by one and only one organisation in the State and that it alone ought to be subsidised.

It is already obvious that lots of RTE's output cannot be called public service broadcasting. None of 2FM is. Screening Oprah Winfrey is not. Most of all, Winning Streak, the manipulative, most popular and successful adfest for the voluntary tax that is the National Lottery, is not. But plenty of RTE output is, as is the output of independent radio broadcasters. The new technology asks, additionally, is RTE Online a public service? If so, are not also, for example, all online newspapers? The advent of digital TV and the convergence of TV and the Internet is going to make a nonsense of the public funding of public service broadcasting, even if we could agree what that is, by a tax on one appliance. For sure, the change will not take the 27 years that have passed since the radio licence went.

Oliver O'Connor is an investment funds specialist