The worst kept secret in broadcasting is out; Matt Brittin becomes BBC DG to wrestle with the myriad challenges facing the corporation.

News focuses on his background as a senior European Google exec. He’s also a white, male, British, Oxbridge graduate in his late fifties. Don’t hold your breath for radical moves. He’s also a top boat rower. A real man of the people…

It does matter who is the DG and what they know and, in particular, how well they come to terms with what they don’t know. Brittin has zero editorial experience; that’s not a bad thing, having a lot is often accompanied by a snobbish arrogance, particularly in the BBC. But DGs often fall because of editorial mistakes they couldn’t reasonably have done anything about. It will be an early sign of good sense to declare himself a CEO type of DG, while appointing someone else to be the Editor-in-Chief part of the job – and an expendable firewall. Doesn’t sound great when you put it like that, but just watch the number of candidates that will line up.

Whatever, the $64m question is the existential threat to the BBC posed by funding. Soon some concrete propositions need to follow the recent acknowledgement from the BBC that the current system has long outlived its viability. The licence fee is now a Zombie Tax in its last desperate throws. I recently received a letter (yes, paper through the post, even though they’ve had my email for years) reminder to pay the TV tax. It looked like it was a project for an underperforming graphics undergrad, uninspiring is an understatement.

Its somewhat threatening undertow about how compulsory it is to have a licence was accompanied by borderline misleading copy that implies you must have the licence to use any UK TV services, and it was festooned with ITVX, Channel 4 and 5 logos to hammer the point. In fact, only live streaming on those platforms does fall within the remit – having their material used as a major come-on to licence fee payers must be galling to those services that don’t get a penny from the licence.

Anyway, it’s all dancing on the head of a pin at this point – one in eight households now ignore the need for a licence, that’s over half a billion of revenue, and that number is going up and is already far higher among the young. The elasticity of demand and credibility has been stretched to breaking point and any increase in the fee will result in a more than compensating decline in compliance.

So, act now, set out the options: some more advertising (there’s already a lot on non-UK services), more partnerships with platforms, PPV, voluntary contributions, basic subs, tiered subs, a more transparent and realistic level of provision with a much-reduced licence fee – a blend of all the above. And let’s rule out a.) an-advertising free for all (that would fundamentally undermine the existing commercial broadcasters) and b.) state funding of any kind – how ever arms-length, when the chips are down, it is never far enough.

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Tags: BBC, Matt Brittin