Public Television Funding: Comparison Across 18 Western Countries

What is the level of government funding for public broadcasters worldwide?

How important are commercial revenue streams in the mix?

These questions matter at a time when public television faces fierce cutbacks from ideologically-driven governments.

• That’s certainly the situation in Australia, where the governing Coalition announced a $254 mn cutback for the ABC, and proposed a doubling of SBS’s ad load to commercial network levels.
• And in Canada, CBC has endured years of rolling cuts.
• The incoming US Congress is expected to direct its razor at PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
• The UK’s license-funded system is also in the cross-hairs of conservative government-shrinkers.

Canadian Study

CBC|Radio-Canada commissioned a valuable study that analyzes public television funding across 18 Western countries.

• It captures the relative level of public support per capita, the share of revenues coming from commercial sources including advertisers & sponsors, and much more.
• These 2011 Findings from Nordicity Consultants are still very relevant: they provide a baseline of data for defenders of public television.

HIGHLIGHTS

We selected two charts as highlights.

Funding

• Among 18 Western countries, Canada was third in terms of the lowest level of per-capita public funding for public broadcasting.
• Only New Zealand and the U.S. posted lower levels.
• At $33 per inhabitant (all amounts in C$), Canada’s level of funding was 60% less than the $82 average across the 18 Western countries.

• CBC|Radio-Canada is often compared to the BBC in the United Kingdom (U.K.), but notably CBC has only one-third of the level of per capita public funding as public broadcasters in the U.K. – BBC and S4C.
• The leading country in terms of public funding is Norway, where NRK received the equivalent of $180 per capita.
• CBC/Radio-Canada’s funding will decline further as a result of the federal deficit reduction action plan (DRAP). When the cuts are fully implemented in 2014/15 fiscal year, CBC/Radio-Canada’s per capita funding will decline from $33 to $29.

Possible Catch?

• The US data point of C$3:00 per head seems low.
• The US public TV system is a somewhat anarchic federation. A mix of federal, state and local funding streams covers both national and local programming, as well station operations.
• C$3 per capita may not capture the entire picture.
• In any case, public television was a latecomer to the US broadcasting environment compared with other Western countries, and its funding level per capita is a fraction of its peers.

Commercial Sources

• Among the 18 comparison countries, public broadcasters did not earn any commercial revenues in Sweden, Norway & Denmark: all of their income was derived from public funding sources, namely television & radio licence fees levied on households and businesses.

• One-half of the comparison countries earned anywhere from 1% to 24% of their total revenue from commercial activities.
• Seven countries – Canada, Spain, Italy, the U.K., the U.S., Ireland and NZ – relied upon commercial activities to generate one-third or more of their total public broadcasting revenues.

Further charts break out such data as Advertiser/Sponsor sources as a share of total revenues.

Link

• Here again is the link to the full CBC|Radio-Canada commissioned report.
• http://www.cbc.radio-canada.ca/_files/cbcrc/documents/latest-studies/nordicity-analysis-public-broadcasting-en.pdf
• Thanks for the tipoff to Edward Peill, president of Canada’s Tell Tale Productions. We met last month at Science Congress in Hong Kong.