Hostile governments and resentful competitors have never managed to knock the British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc) off its privileged perch. The public-service broadcaster remains a behemoth with tentacles in fields as disparate as publishing and the internet, all paid for by an international anomaly: a licence fee levied on any household in Britain with a television that receives broadcasts.rnYet the government's latest meditation on the future of British media, a report on "Digital Britain" published on June 16th, contains the seeds of a more challenging future for the corporation. It suggests that surplus revenue earmarked for the switchover to digital television could be given to other broadcasters to pay for regional news, as well as used to provide universal broadband access to the internet (see next story). The sums involved in this "top-slicing" of the licence fee amount to a sliver of the £3.4 billion ($5.6 billion) it raises a year.
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