Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The BBC has an annual budget of about £4.6bn (about US$7.4bn) - that would be one heck of a private membership organisation! About £3.4bn of that comes from the tax payer; the other £1.2bn from the BBC's commercial businesses (eg selling programmes to overseas broadcasters).
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Hmmm... Let's see if we can estimate the size of public broadcasting in the US...
The nearest equivalent to the BBC here in the US is a combination of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) (directly supported by Uncle Sam, i.e. our tax $$), PLUS the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) supported mostly by viewer donations funneled through individual stations along with a minority of foundation and industrial support along with rather modest support from CPB (so it's mostly a private membership organization) PLUS National Public Radio (NPR) which is just like PBS but for radio instead of television, PLUS all the local PBS TV affiliates (which are all private membership organizations) PLUS all the local NPR radio affiliates (ditto private membership organizations).
A quick check of budgets shows (at the national level):
- CPB: $0.5bn from Federal Gov't (source tax revenues plus debt)
- PBS: $0.58bn, of which 0.05bn comes from taxes (that is, from the CPB!), remainder is memberships and donations of various sorts.
- NPR: $0.15bn, of which ~16% comes from various levels of government (mostly the CPB above), remainder from "private membership organization" (e.g. donations from individuals, businesses, foundations, etc.)
The various individual stations are, in aggregate, much larger than the umbrella organizations. But there're too many of them for me to do a similar rundown. Some quick math on various statements made in the financial data for PBS and NPR suggests that the NPR member stations, in aggregate, have a total budget of about $1bn per year (of which 16% came from the CPB). The PBS stations are much larger than the radio stations on average, and get an average of about 10% of their revenue from various levels of government. A similar estimation says they have a total budget of about $3bn to $5bn per year, of which about 10% comes from the CPB and other levels of government.
Note that my estimates for the budgets of the local affiliates are based on dividing up the CPB money as $0.15bn to NPR affiliates, $0.30bn to PBS affiliates, and the remaining $0.05bn to PBS directly (only this last is known to be correct). I then applied the typical %age from government to (in inverse) to the CPB money to get the estimated aggregate budget for the local stations.
This will be an underestimate to the extent that they get $$ from governmental sources other than the CPB.
Overall, that gives us a rough estimate that public broadcasting in the US is around a $5bn to $7bn per year enterprise, with $0.5bn to $0.75bn (16% or less!) coming from various levels of government, and the remainder raised through typical charitable means (e.g. "private membership organization").
So having a $7bn per year enterprise that is based mostly on private memberships is large-ish, but entirely feasible. That's how it works here in the US on an ongoing basis.
Xenophon