It was frozen for many years (totally not revenge by the government for Hutton), and hasn’t risen enough since being unfrozen. Meanwhile, their burden has increased as now S4C, local democracy reporters at local newspapers, and most of the World Service are funded from the licence fee.
There was a move to increase earnings, so BBC Studios was merged with the commercial Worldwide subsidiary and for the first time was permitted to seek commissions outside the BBC, producing for commercial channels.
The Doctor Who thing is more individual. It was a deal signed when streamers were flashing a lot of cash around, and BBC Studios was able to leverage Bluey’s massive popularity to get a major investment in Doctor Who.
But streaming tie-ups aren’t new - see Ripper Street and The Last Kingdom last decade, and they themselves are just continuations of the co-production arrangements that have been important to British production for decades.
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 1 week ago
The BBC is certainly beginning to struggle. Even though it’s news programming drifts further and further to the right each year, it’s still full of great radio, comedy, drama and other content - but right wing politicians have been trying to get rid of it for years.
It obviously doesn’t help that you have people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, taking a break from his normal schedule of reanimating the corpses of women he’s previously strangled, putting videos on YouTube saying “here’s a guide on how to avoid paying your TV licence” (he did exactly this a few weeks back).