EXCLUSIVE: The Motion Picture Association (MPA), the trade body that represents U.S. studios including Netflix and Disney, is lobbying against proposals in the UK that could require its members to support the BBC in collecting its funding.
The MPA, which also counts Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount among its members, has said that it would “caution against” any plan for third parties to help the BBC impose the licence fee on more British households.
The BBC is desperate to arrest the rise in people refusing to pay the licence fee. Some 94% of the UK population use the BBC every month, but fewer than 80% pay the £180 ($240) annual licence fee. The national broadcaster is in talks with the government to modernize the funding mechanism as part of charter renewal, a process that will extend its operating agreement.
One of the ideas under discussion is extending the licence fee to cover households that watch non-live content via streaming services. Under the current model, only viewers watching live output, such as Netflix’s WWE content or the Champions League on Amazon Prime Video, are required to pay the licence fee.
The BBC has argued that this is not “widely understood” and “there is little or no effort made by the services in question to inform them.” The BBC wants to change this and has put forward proposals to the government for the likes of Netflix and Disney+ to share data and introduce “pop-up warnings” about the need to have a licence fee. The government is said to be receptive to this idea, according to a report in The Times of London last month.
The MPA will fight the plans. “The task of collecting the licence fee remains, for good reason, the duty of the BBC and TV Licencing, and the focus should be on making this process more effective rather than creating new responsibilities for others,” it said. “Such responsibilities would likely incur new costs for business, with a downstream impact on viewers and their viewing experience.”
The MPA’s intervention came in written evidence to UK Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which is holding an inquiry into BBC charter renewal.
ITV, the UK commercial broadcaster in talks to be sold to Comcast, also bristled at the licence fee proposals. In its written submission, the company said: “Forcing private companies to enforce a public funding mechanism that distorts the market by subsidising a direct competitor sets an unacceptable precedent for market intervention, and would constitute a regulatory overreach.”
The MPA did welcome one element of the government’s thinking: The rejection of a streamer levy to help fund the BBC. “Such a move could reduce streamer revenues available to invest directly in UK content and discourage investment in the UK film and television sector more broadly,” the MPA said.
