The Future of Yle - the Finnish Broadcasting Company

Lauri Kivinen, the CEO of Yle, was interviewed the other night and today a one page interview was published by Helsingin Sanomat.

According to Kivinen there are an estimated 250 thousand households in Finland, that do not pay their tv-licence.

The year 2003 was the peak year. Up to that year the number of tv licenses (fees) has followed the growth in the number of households. From 2003 the number of households has grown by 50 000 and the number of tv fees has decreased by more than 100 000. This gap has grown in seven years by 150 000 ( http://www.tv-maksu.fi/index/tietoa/tilastot.html , http://www.stat.fi/til/ktutk/2006/ktutk_2006_2008-08-11_tau_009.html , http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Televisiomaksu ).

Yle needs to do something about this problem. Several possibilities are emerging e.g. cut downs in Swedish speaking programmes, cut downs in the Yle regional network and cuts in sports programmes were all discussed - but declined - on wednesday. Kivinen seemed to be putting pressure on the politicians. The mechanism is simple: I would assume Kivinen proposes cuts to the board and if they decline, they will have to come up with more money. It was not surprising that the board announced an increase of 3% in the Finnsih tv fee (last year saw an increase of 6%).

Helsingin Sanomat added to the list of possibilities and pointed out that Yle buys half of the entertainment content from outsiders and that the amount of entertainment content bought, will be cut down.

Kivinen, on his wednesday interview, also commented that the present tv eqipmnet based license fee is becoming iimpossible and that new ways of financing the service will have to be found. He put forward two possibilities: direct state budget financing and a media fee.

I believe that Yle will have to be financed through the state budget. Some European countries have recently (2000-) given up the tv fee (http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Televisiomaksu) and I believe this is also the future of the Finnish system.

Change seems to be particularly difficult for politicians.