The unanswered question is not where the money comes from.
It's "what is the BBC for"? And I think at the heart of this issue is that we don't really know any more.
It was originally conceived because the great and the good thought that we needed to be saved from low music hall entertainment and any form of politics that might affect the status quo. It's been reinvented several times since then, and presently seems to be at cross purposes with itself, the industry and the government.
It's no longer vertically-integrated, it's not quite the massive monolith that is sometimes made out, but it's still undoubtedly has a scale that some of its competitors envy and question. Other, private sector, organisations run the technical broadcast infrastructure. Other, private sector, organisations (including its rivals) make many of the programmes - this was ostensibly to create a plurality of UK media companies, but many of the latter have now become part of large international conglomerates themselves. Its most popular output is the output that is most frequently criticised for undermining commercial interests, but what would be the purpose of an unpopular broadcaster, however funded?
There's no point in a BBC that simply takes money from the licence fee payers and gives it to commercial concerns to make programmes - if people what those programmes, they can pay directly. There's no point in a BBC that is simply a subscription service - you don't need an institution with a Royal Charter to replicate Netflix.
We need to make up our minds what we want the BBC to do. Once we've done that, how it's paid for is a secondary problem.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
