The BBC's Charter ends in 2027. Maybe we shouldn't renew the BBC. Maybe we should build what comes next.

How we got here

The BBC's Royal Charter runs out at the end of 2027. Normally that means a negotiation, a settlement, a renewal. But this time the ground underneath the settlement has moved.

Licence-fee participation is falling: fewer households pay it each year. Traditional linear television viewing is declining, and what remains is ageing. Viewing keeps shifting to iPlayer, to streaming apps, to on-demand.

Fewer households pay. Fewer hours are watched. The 24-hour schedule matters less every year.

A major broadcast network is built around filling a schedule, hour after hour. An IP service isn't. As linear declines, the need to keep BBC One, BBC Two and the rest continuously populated, which drives a great deal of commissioning and acquisition, quietly loses some of its rationale. Even Freeview itself is not necessarily permanent: terrestrial television will one day be switched off, though when is a decision for government.

Meanwhile the market has been reshaped. British broadcasting is consolidating, and the groups on the other side of the table (Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sky/Comcast) operate at a scale no UK broadcaster can match. Households already receive enormous quantities of drama, factual and entertainment from them. Public media no longer needs to guarantee a universally free supply of every genre.

And yet the things people say they value have barely changed, and they look much more like public-service guarantees than like content quotas: trusted news. British children's programmes and education. The nations and regions seeing themselves on screen. Culture and music. Distinctive radio: BBC radio remains one of the most distinctive things British broadcasting does. And the big shared national moments that still gather everyone in one place.

Here is the part that makes 2027 an opportunity rather than a crisis: the BBC, Channel 4 and UKTV still have real scale: brands, talent, rights, production muscle and audiences. Strong enough, today, to build something designed for the next era. Wait another decade and the same reform would be attempted from weakness: smaller audiences, weaker brands, worse economics.

This is not a plan to save the BBC. It is an attempt to decide what public media Britain needs next, while the assets of the old system are still strong enough to build it.

The old settlement is unwinding.

The trends tell the story. Each card carries its source, period, definition and latest data date, and no number appears here until it can be traced to a published figure.

Start with what Britain still needs.

Britain does not need to decide how to preserve the BBC for another generation. It needs to decide what public-service media it wants for another generation, and then use the assets of today's BBC to build it. Five things Britain still needs from public media anchor the design:

1. News

   Independent, trusted national and international journalism.

2. Nations & Local

   Civic information, local journalism, national representation and Welsh-language media.

3. Culture & Kids

   British children's content, education, culture and music the market won't supply at scale.

4. Entertainment

   Popular British programmes and shared national moments, funded commercially.

5. World Service

   International public-service journalism, separately funded.

Those five needs don't map neatly onto five organisations. Nor should they. News, culture, local services and entertainment need different relationships with public money, commercial income and government, while the services audiences use can draw on more than one part of the system.

Don't reorganise the BBC. Start with its job.

The BBC today puts very different kinds of activity inside one organisation. News, local radio, children's programmes, Radio 2, Strictly Come Dancing, iPlayer and an international production business all sit under broadly the same institutional roof. There is no particular reason the next settlement has to work that way.

Start instead with the things we want public media to guarantee, then ask what funding and structure gives each one the best chance of succeeding.

Let's protect the things the market cannot be relied upon to provide

News needs a particularly strong form of independence. If its budget and its leaders remain tied to government decisions, arguments about political influence never really disappear. So News gets its own institution and an endowment: a proposed one-off founding settlement, built once and then drawn on annually, not money that exists today, so that its budget is nobody's yearly spending decision and its governors are not the government's appointments.

Nations & Local and Culture & Kids are different. They are explicit public services, and Parliament can sensibly pay for them, provided the funding is multi-year, the governance is at arm's length, and ministers neither appoint nor direct the people running them.

The World Service is different again. Britain chooses to fund an international public-service news operation, so government transparently commissions and pays for it, while remaining entirely outside its journalism.

Same public purpose. Different institutions, because they need different relationships with money, markets and government.

Stop using public money to fund everything entertainment does

Drama, comedy, entertainment, big shared events and popular radio still matter. Strictly, Doctor Who, The Traitors, Radio 1 and Radio 2 are part of British culture and help create shared moments. But that does not mean every household has to fund all of them through a compulsory licence fee.

Why one company? Because the market these businesses compete in is no longer national. Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Comcast/Sky and the other global groups spread their technology, marketing, content investment and rights exploitation across hundreds of millions of customers in every territory. No single UK broadcaster can match that scale, and none will get closer to it by staying separate.

Britain nevertheless already owns several unusually strong media assets. Rather than let each become relatively smaller as the market globalises, the proposal combines their complementary strengths into one British company with enough scale to compete, invest and grow internationally. This is not principally a conventional merger designed to cut back-office costs. The prize is strategic: one major UK streaming and customer relationship through iPlayer & Sounds; a much larger combined audience and catalogue; subscription and advertising income inside the same business; real scale for streaming technology, product and marketing; a larger addressable advertising platform; more commissioning power to back bigger British projects; more programme rights and IP to exploit internationally, with BBC Studios distributing a much broader pipeline of British content; stronger bargaining power with global platforms and suppliers; and international profits reinvested in British content.

Scale is the reason to put them together; difference is the reason to keep their brands.

Because scale does not mean homogenising. BBC entertainment, Channel 4 and UKTV should keep doing different jobs for different audiences. These are the building blocks Britain already owns, and what each brings:

They are complementary pieces of the British media system which are more valuable together.

audience → subscription + advertising → commissioning → production + IP → global exploitation → reinvestment

Together they form a vertically connected British media business: audiences fund commissioning, commissioning feeds production and rights, rights earn globally, and global earnings flow back into British programmes.

The connective tissue already exists. BBC Studios already owns UKTV. UKTV has spent decades commercially exploiting BBC programming. Channel 4's 4Sales already sells UKTV's advertising inventory, and has represented UKTV in the advertising market since 2010. BBC Studios already operates globally. Channel 4 is already publicly owned and commercially funded. And all of them derive much of their value from the same things: British programmes, British audiences, British talent and British IP.

So make the proposition explicit: instead of asking taxpayers to keep funding popular entertainment, put Britain's publicly owned commercial media assets together, as iPlayer & Sounds (I&S), named after the two BBC consumer products that already act as its front doors, and ask them to grow. The point is not to make the old BBC cheaper. It is to create something Britain does not currently have: a permanently publicly owned British media company with enough scale to build a substantial global business, whose international success subsidises British programmes, talent and IP instead of flowing to overseas shareholders.

Separate public purpose from distribution

Splitting the institutions does not mean audiences experience five disconnected organisations. The old broadcasting model welds institution, funding, channel and distribution together. The new one doesn't need to.

BBC News Corporation can make journalism for BBC News, Radio 4, 5 Live and Channel 4 News. Culture & Kids can commission programmes that stream on iPlayer. Nations & Local services can live in the same apps. Radio 4 can remain one coherent station even when different parts of its output are funded by different institutions behind the scenes. And iPlayer and Sounds can stay the front door without institutionally owning everything they distribute.

Viewers and listeners don't need to experience the federation.

Behind the screen, different institutions fund and commission different things. In front of it, iPlayer and Sounds still make the system feel coherent.

Public service is the requirement. The institutions are the service providers.

Put the pieces together and this is the shape: each need paired with the funding and governance that gives it the best chance, and the commercial assets gathered into iPlayer & Sounds.

This proposal breaks up the BBC as a single corporation. It doesn't require throwing away the BBC brands audiences value.

Separate institutions don't mean separate services. The organisations can commission and make different things while contributing to the same familiar BBC outputs. News and Culture & Kids can both contribute to Radio 4; Nations & Local and BBC News can share journalism and reporting. The organisational boundaries exist to give each public purpose the right funding and governance, not to create walls between them.

Nations & Local would run regional television news, local radio and local and regional online journalism. Its journalists could contribute reporting to BBC News, while BBC News would provide national and international journalism back into those services.

Public-service journalism also has to reach people, not simply exist. At a time of fractured media consumption, misinformation and declining trust in institutions, distribution is part of the public-service job. The settlement should therefore guarantee appropriate distribution and prominence for BBC News and Nations & Local journalism across the federation's major services and platforms.

Culture & Kids exists to commission things Britain has decided are valuable even where the market alone may not provide enough of them: British children's content, education, science, religion and ethics, the arts, classical music and other forms of cultural expression. Its success should be measured in public value, reach and quality rather than commercial return.

For audiences, much of this should be invisible. BBC News can remain BBC News, Radio 4 can remain Radio 4 and familiar services can continue to bring together programmes from across the federation. The change is in who is responsible for making and funding them, not a requirement to dismantle the services or brands people value.

Where does today's BBC go?

The institutions change. Most of what you actually watch and listen to does not. Here is where today's familiar services start out in 2028.

BBC One does not disappear on 1 January 2028. iPlayer & Sounds initially operates the mainstream linear television portfolio while audiences carry on migrating to IP.

Keep Channel 4 as the challenger.

Free, £7 with ads, or £15 Premium.

Publicly funded services remain universally available. Entertainment works differently: the Free tier preserves reach, advertising inventory and a route into subscription, while the paid tiers fund the deeper entertainment offer.

What about shared national moments?

There is an obvious tension here: entertainment supporting itself commercially, and public media guaranteeing the moments the country watches together. The resolution is to separate two different things.

And the covenant closes the gap: iPlayer & Sounds carries a standing obligation to maintain a meaningful slate of universally available shared British programmes and events each year: an obligation, deliberately not an hours quota. See the bargain.

iPlayer & Sounds: the big British media bet.

iPlayer & Sounds is not the commercial leftovers of the BBC. It is a deliberate bet: build a great British media company that invests in British content and intellectual property, serves UK audiences whether they pay or not, and funds that investment by building a much larger global commercial operation from BBC entertainment, BBC Studios, Channel 4 and UKTV.

1. UK audiences
2. Subscriptions + advertising
3. British programmes, talent & IP
4. BBC Studios + global exploitation
5. International revenue & profit
6. More British investment, back to UK audiences

The bargain with iPlayer & Sounds.

iPlayer & Sounds inherits extremely valuable public assets: brands, archives, rights, production capability and an audience relationship built with public money over a century. It does not get them for nothing.

The public assets are not simply handed to a commercial company. They are exchanged for a permanent public-purpose covenant.

The Public Interest Guardian exists partly to enforce this covenant. It is the body that holds the ownership lock and the public purposes, while the commercial board runs the business.

BBC News: independent because nobody holds the purse strings.

BBC News has a problem bigger than its budget. It is repeatedly dragged into the political argument about the BBC itself.

Every Charter cycle, funding settlement, change of government or on-air controversy starts the same round of questions. Is it biased? Who appoints its leadership? Should its budget be cut, or protected? Does government have too much influence? Is the BBC independent enough?

Most of those arguments are not evidence of direct political interference. But the structure keeps manufacturing both the opportunity for pressure and the perception of it, because the institution ultimately depends on recurring decisions about money and governance, taken by the people it reports on.

Why not just pay for it?

There is an obvious conventional answer. Government could fund BBC News directly: a £700m annual grant is entirely possible, and would need nothing like £20bn of founding capital. In straightforward public-finance terms, it is the much easier option.

But it leaves News connected to exactly the things that cause the trouble: spending reviews, political funding cycles, repeated settlements, changes of government and recurring arguments about appointments.

You can fund BBC News perfectly well from government. The harder question is whether we can fund it in a way that stops its future being renegotiated by government.

Why not think bigger?

£20bn is a huge lift, and there is no point pretending otherwise. But it buys something a grant cannot: the possibility of turning News into a permanent national institution for journalism, rather than another public body that periodically negotiates its own budget.

It helps to be precise about what the number is. This is not £20bn spent on BBC News. It is £20bn turned into a permanent national asset for journalism: capital that is invested, kept whole in real terms, and draws down 3.5% a year, forever.

£20bn endowment × 3.5% real draw = £700m a year

Where the capital could come from

These are building blocks, not a forecast, and they do not resolve neatly into a funded plan. The precise founding stack is a policy choice that is not yet fixed:

• Government founding capital
• Spectrum proceeds, as and when terrestrial television is retired
• Major philanthropy
• Public donations and legacies
• Staged capitalisation and investment growth over time
• = the £20bn target

And the full endowment is not the only workable answer. A £700m annual government grant, a smaller endowment topped up by a grant, or an endowment built progressively over decades would all fund the same journalism. The full version is proposed because it gives the cleanest constitutional separation, not because it is the only arithmetic that works.

What £700m pays for

The target is not a round number chosen first and justified afterwards. It is what an independent BBC News costs to run, built from the bottom up, and then converted into the capital needed to fund it in perpetuity.

• £200m
  UK + international newsgathering, correspondents & bureaux
• £105m
  Network TV/video bulletins, live coverage & specials
• £50m
  BBC News Channel
• £90m
  BBC News digital: website, app, social, data journalism
• £55m
  Radio 4 news/current affairs supply + news podcasts
• £90m
  Radio 5 Live + Sports Extra
• £45m
  Investigations, specialist current affairs & explanatory journalism
• £35m
  News-specific product, operations, distribution & technology
• £30m
  Governance, legal, standards, audience & corporate support
• £700m
  a year, the annual requirement the endowment has to meet

Modelled 2028 allocations in constant 2028 pounds, not current reported divisional expenditure. The World Service is excluded and separately funded; Nations & Local is excluded; shared infrastructure appears only where News specifically needs it.

The £20bn target endowment is a proposal, not existing funding. At a 3.5% base real draw it produces exactly that £700m a year. Founding capital is illustrative, not forecast: a government founding settlement, future DTT spectrum value, philanthropy, a public campaign and legacies, and investment growth.

Parliament does create these structures, through founding legislation: there is no way of establishing new national institutions without it. What the design removes is the continuing ministerial hold: initial appointments made through an independent statutory process drawing nominations from several independent institutions rather than by ministerial selection, then staggered terms, statutory appointment criteria, and no ministerial power of dismissal. The objective is straightforward: the government of the day cannot choose the people running News, sack them, or threaten next year's grant.

Governance follows purpose.

The structures differ deliberately, because the purposes differ. What they share: ministers appoint nobody to the boards of BBC News or iPlayer & Sounds, and cannot dismiss their directors. Public funding never buys editorial or operational control.

Appointments for Nations & Local and Culture & Kids run through an independent Media Appointments Commission: nominations come from several independent institutions, against statutory criteria, with staggered terms, and no ministerial shortlist, approval, veto or power of dismissal. iPlayer & Sounds appointments sit within its separate Guardian structure. Parliament legislates the framework; it does not staff it. Government can fund public media without appointing the people who run it.

Who regulates it?

The intention isn't to create a new super-regulator. Ofcom would continue to regulate broadcasting, audience protections, prominence and the relevant public-service obligations within its statutory remit. The new institutions would also have their own statutory purposes and published obligations. Their boards and guardians govern them; Ofcom regulates them where appropriate; Parliament sets the law. Those jobs should remain distinct.

What it costs, and whether the commercial business works.

The model starts from the BBC's current public-service cost base of £4.51bn a year (a reported figure) and reallocates it into the successor bodies, reconciling back to that starting point. Funding source matters as much as destination: News is not annual government spending: its £700m is an endowment draw. Nations & Local, Culture & Kids and the World Service are recurring public funding. iPlayer & Sounds is commercial, carrying a BBC domestic operating cost of £2.38bn in 2028.

• £700m BBC News: endowment draw, not government spending
• £500m Nations & Local (including S4C): five-year public settlement
• £278m Culture & Kids: five-year public settlement
• £200m World Service: separate government settlement
• £978m recurring government funding a year, incl World Service

Does the commercial business work?

Honestly: not at first. iPlayer & Sounds loses money in its early years (−£466.1m in 2028) before integration savings and subscription growth turn it profitable in the base case in 2032, reaching £841.6m by 2035 on income of £5,700.4m.

Build your version.

The base case assumes 50% of homes take a paid tier at launch, 35% of those choose Premium, and prices are £7 and £15 a month. Change any of them and see what happens to the business through to 2035.

The interactive pricing and mix controls need JavaScript. Without it, the base assumptions above and the published sensitivity cases below tell the same story.

Getting there: one legal moment, several operational years.

The institutional sequence

What happens to the BBC itself? The proposal assumes the old corporate structure is progressively wound down once its assets, obligations and staff have transferred, while BBC remains in use as valuable consumer and service brands where that serves audiences. That is a proposal about how to sequence the change, not an inevitable legal consequence of it.

There are real one-off costs

A transformation of this size has genuine establishment costs: separating the organisations; transferring and restructuring staff; migrating systems and data; building subscription, billing and payment capability; expanding advertising technology and sales; marketing the new offer to every household; legal, contracts and rights work; integrating the BBC's commercial operations with Channel 4 and UKTV where that helps; and running duplicated systems while the change happens. The model does not publish a separate establishment-cost total: these costs are carried inside the transition cash requirement below. £2.40bn is not "the cost of reorganising the BBC".

The bigger issue is working capital while the new model settles

On 1 January 2028 a compulsory income stream stops and a voluntary one starts: the licence fee ends overnight, and subscriptions, advertising and commercial growth replace it. Nobody can know in advance precisely how quickly households will convert. The base model assumes 50% take a paid tier at launch, an assumption about millions of individual household decisions, not a fact. So the new company needs a strong balance sheet while the model settles. The published sensitivity cases show exactly why:

That matters because the whole point is to build a long-term British media institution. A serious capital plan is what stops management cancelling programmes, cutting marketing or selling assets six months after launch simply because take-up starts a few points below the central assumption. Adequate capitalisation is a feature of a serious transition plan, not evidence that the commercial model has failed.

What the £2.40bn package is for

• £750m
  Separation / capitalisation grantA one-off public contribution recognising that government has chosen to replace the existing settlement and create the new institutions: initial equity-like capital that helps meet unavoidable separation and restructuring costs.
• £1.00bn
  Patient government transition facilityLong-dated transition finance available while subscriptions and integration savings ramp up, designed to be repaid rather than to become a permanent subsidy if the business performs as planned.
• £650m
  Commercial RCF / backstopOrdinary commercial liquidity for volatility and working-capital swings: available rather than expected to be drawn in full.
• £2.40bn
  committed liquidity

To be clear about what that buys: £2.40bn is the proposed initial liquidity package around the base case. It covers the modelled £2.14bn base peak with some headroom, but it does not fully cover the published 45% (£2.80bn) or 40% (£3.60bn) downside cases. The package is therefore an initial capital plan, not a claim that no further financing could ever be required. A materially weaker launch would require a response: additional borrowing, slower investment, faster savings or additional capital, and the honest position is to disclose that risk rather than hide it.

A settlement built for what comes next.

None of these are small ideas. Breaking up the BBC, ending the licence fee, creating an endowed news institution, asking popular entertainment to support itself commercially, and combining BBC entertainment, BBC Studios, Channel 4 and UKTV are big swings.

But keeping broadly the current settlement is also a major choice. It would mean betting that a funding system with fewer licence-fee payers every year, a television system with fewer linear viewers every year, and institutions largely designed for twentieth-century broadcasting are still the right foundations for the 2030s and 2040s.

The aim isn't to preserve today's institutions. It's to preserve the things they were created to achieve.

Some things still deserve a guarantee: excellent independent journalism; British children's content and education; the nations, regions and local media; culture and music; distinctive British radio; and the big shared national moments. But they do not all need the same organisation, the same funding mechanism, the same governance or the same relationship with government, which is why this proposal gives each one the arrangement it actually needs.

And popular entertainment remains culturally important: it just no longer needs everyone to pay for it by law. Bringing together BBC entertainment, BBC Studios, Channel 4 and UKTV is intended to create a British media company with sufficient scale to compete internationally, and to recycle its global commercial success into British programmes, IP and talent.

None of this is a forecast. We don't know whether exactly half of households would pay, how quickly advertising would develop, the precise integration savings or the ultimate rate of international growth. The point is not that this is what will happen. It is that a different future is plausible enough to be worth discussing. That uncertainty is why the assumptions are published, and why you can change the important ones yourself.

The Charter ending in 2027 is a rare moment when Britain has to make a decision anyway. The choice is not simply change versus no change. It is whether the next settlement spends another decade managing the declining economics of the old model, or uses the strong assets that remain today to build institutions designed for what comes next.

Sources & methodology

The evidence

The reported figures in the model trace back to published documents. What each one supports:

• Group Annual Report and Accounts 2025/26BBC · 2025/26

  Used for: Current BBC income, the public-service cost base, service expenditure and BBC Studios/commercial figures.

  View original source
• Annual Report and Accounts 2025Channel 4 · 2025

  Used for: Channel 4 revenue, advertising, costs and remit evidence, including £1.03bn total revenue, £640m content investment and £346m digital advertising revenue in 2025.

  View original source · Readable summary
• Statutory accounts and filing historyUKTV Media Ltd · 2025/26

  Used for: UKTV revenue and commercial performance.

  View original source
• UKTV and C4 agree long term extension of exclusive sales partnershipChannel 4 · 18 January 2017

  Used for: Evidence that Channel 4's 4Sales has represented UKTV's inventory in the advertising market since 2010: commercial integration between two of the proposed iPlayer & Sounds assets that already exists.

  View original source · Later 4Sales announcement
• Advertise with usUKTV

  Used for: UKTV's own account of how its advertising inventory is sold.

  View original source
• Licences facts and figuresTV Licensing · to March 2025

  Used for: Monthly TV licences in force: the measure of how many households still pay the licence fee.

  View original source
• Media Nations 2025 (UK report)Ofcom · 2025

  Used for: The historic broadcast-TV-on-TV-sets viewing series, average minutes per person per day, 2019 to 2024.

  View original source · 2020 viewing release
• Media Nations 2026Ofcom · 2026

  Used for: Weekly reach of traditional broadcaster content, growth in broadcaster on-demand viewing, SVoD household penetration, which service viewers turn to first, and linear live and recorded viewing on Barb's newer all-device measure.

  View original source · Ofcom summary
• Communications Market Report 2026: interactive dataOfcom · 2026

  Used for: Supporting interactive dataset for UK television viewing and market trends.

  View original source
• VAT ratesHM Revenue & Customs

  Used for: Converting consumer subscription shelf prices into net business revenue.

  View original source
• Podcasts, pay-TV and public service broadcasting: top trends from our latest look at the UK's media habitsOfcom · 29 July 2026

  Used for: Pay-TV and streaming revenues of £11.4bn in 2025, and SVoD subscriptions in 70% of UK households in 2026, up only two percentage points since 2022.

  View original source
• Further findings from our latest look at the UK's media habitsOfcom · 30 July 2025

  Used for: Why households cancel or downgrade streaming subscriptions: cost is the most common reason given.

  View original source

The model, mapped

The public model behind this page, in plain terms, each part links to where it appears above:

• Starting point

  The BBC's current £4.5bn public-service cost base and its commercial businesses.

• The new settlement

  News, Nations & Local, Culture & Kids, the World Service and iPlayer & Sounds, and how each is funded.

• The consumer model

  Addressable households, the Free / Ads / Premium shares, prices, VAT and subscription revenue.

• iPlayer & Sounds, 2028–35

  Income, costs, operating result and paid homes, year by year.

• Sensitivity

  40–60% paid uptake, the peak cash requirement and the path to profitability.

• News

  The endowment, the draw rate and the illustrative founding sources.

• Transition

  Establishment and restructuring costs, early losses and the liquidity package.

The site itself is generated from a versioned data snapshot of the same model, in constant 2028 pounds. Behind the scenes every figure is classified: reported figures carry their sources, model outputs disclose their logic, assumptions carry explanatory notes, and proposals are design decisions, not forecasts.