BBC Licence fee funding announced for the next 6 years

Wow! Earlier I blogged about the BBC offering to fund the World Service. Well they have really rolled over now agreeing to have the licence fee frozen at £145.50, pay £272m for the World Service , S4C's £102m for S4C, and pay £25m for BBC Monitoring. They really didn't want to take on the £556m a year funding of free TV licences for the over-75s. Mark Sweney and Tara Conlan have written about the deal at the Media Guardian site...

The BBC licence fee is to be frozen at the current level of £145.50 for the next six years, a 16% cut in real terms, after the corporation today concluded a bruising round of funding negotiations with the coalition government.  In addition it will provide £150m a year for the rollout of superfast broadband to rural areas from 2013 and £25m a year for local TV and online content. A further one-off capital investment in local TV and online services of £25m will also come from the licence fee and the BBC will also underwrite the rollout of the digital radio network nationally.

Well another 16% cuts in the BBC budget is going to mean even less quality public service programming. This is really scary. What will the government do next.....