A tax on your laptop

Daly and his ilk are more likely to turn to Google than the goggle box when it comes to entertainment, too. The web developer got rid of his TV set about five years ago when he moved house. “It just struck me one day that I hadn’t switched it on since I watched a race meeting a while back,” he said. “When I checked the date of the race, I realised it had been over two years ago.”

Since Daly gave away his TV, the local television-licence inspector has become a passing acquaintance thanks to regular meetings. “I’ve had four visits in the past five years,” he said. “At first he found it difficult to believe I didn’t have a TV and asked to inspect the house. The last time I met him he said it was quite common.”

Daly can legally escape paying a government charge for getting news and entertainment from his computer — but not for much longer. Conscious that traditional television is becoming redundant for a generation raised on social media, downloads and YouTube, the new coalition government plans to swap the current licence, which costs €160 a year, for a new regime.

The Programme for Government proposes ending the traditional TV licence and introducing a public broadcasting charge (PBC) which every household will have to pay “regardless of the device they use to access content”.

Although the details of the scheme have yet to be fleshed out, Fine Gael, when in opposition, said they would imitate Germany’s forthcoming media charge. Rather than license TVs, radios or even internet connections, the German charge, coming in 2013, will be levied on every household, regardless of whether they have a television, PC or even a smartphone.

Although the Department of Communications was unwilling last week to elaborate on the system proposed for Ireland, it looks likely that it will follow the German example and target every household, possibly even those with no TV or internet access.

So even if you are a committed Luddite who spends the evenings reading novels by lamplight, you’ll be expected to help fund public-service broadcasting.

“The same logic is used to fund other public services,” said Stephen Price, a media analyst. “Your taxes go to fund art galleries, even though you might never visit one. So why shouldn’t you fund public service broadcasting in the same way?”

But will an internet generation brought up on the concept of getting online content for free be so phlegmatic? And if not, how can public-service broadcasting hope to survive in the 21st century?

“UNFORTUNATELY for the government, it will be introducing this new scheme at the same time as water charges and property taxes,” said Price. “It could be a hard sell.”

Getting Irish people to pay a TV licence fee is already difficult. The reason licence inspectors have heard all the excuses, as the advertisement goes, is that we’ve tried them all. RTE estimates about 14% of Irish households currently evade the fee, a far higher percentage than in many European countries.

An Post, which collects the licence fee on behalf of RTE, said recently only two in five households renewed their licence before the expiry date each year, with the rest needing at least one reminder.

There will be a logistical difficulty in levying a new charge on every household in the country, however, even though the information required may also be compiled for the purposes of water or property taxes. Many people are likely to bristle at the notion of a household charge, even if it is only to replace the TV licence fee they are already paying.

Daly, for one, isn’t keen on a new universal charge. “If people are talking on Twitter about something on Prime Time or The Frontline and it sounds lively, I might watch back on the RTE Player, but that’s it,” he said. “I think it would be unfair on someone like me, who only watches a few RTE shows every year, to have to pay a charge.”

Conor Devine from Naas, another IT worker who no longer watches traditional television, is also aghast that he may soon have to pay a charge. “I don’t even own a TV. I watch everything online now and my view would be, ‘Feck off government, you can’t tax what I do on the internet,’ ” he said.

Businesses are also circumspect about the extent of the new charge. The Programme for Government states it will be levied on “applicable businesses”, likely to include pubs and hotels. But what about small firms with internet connections?

“Most small businesses use the internet to make orders and do not benefit from public-service broadcasting, so why should they pay towards it?” a spokeswoman for the Small Firms Association asked. “The devil will be in the detail.”

In Germany, expanding the licence fee to every home with an internet connection has “provoked harsh criticism in the past months”, according to recent news reports.

In the hope of a smoother transition, the Irish government is likely to freeze annual charges until the new system beds down. In the Programme for Government, the coalition says it is possible to save €20m in collection costs by allowing bodies apart from An Post to compete for the right to levy the charge. The government would like utility companies, local authorities and Revenue to consider taking over collection. This would end the “madness” — as Simon Coveney, Fine Gael’s former spokesman on communications, described it — of paying An Post €12m to collect €200m.

Speaking before the election, Coveney argued that the current system was “inappropriate, bad value for money, ineffective and outdated”. He said: “We have an army of people knocking on doors, checking under beds for TVs and asking people whether they have licences.”

The Cork TD also pointed out that it was costing a “great deal of money” to pursue non-payers through the courts.

And anyway, in the age of laptops, iPads and smartphones, how do you even define what a television is?

The new government believes that by applying the scheme to every household, evasion can be eliminated, saving an additional €20m. So, in total, the new government sees potential savings of €40m under the new system.

“Changing how fees are collected will inevitably reopen the debate about how fees should be distributed,” said Price. “Some of the commercial TV and radio stations, for example, would argue they provide a public service through their current-affairs shows. Should they get a cut? There is also an argument for newspapers to get a slice of any public-service charge. After all, many now have video content on their websites.”

The newspaper industry is also in transition, and looking for new ways of raising revenue in an increasingly digitalised world. The Sunday Times now charges to view its website, while The Irish Times charges for its e-paper, although most of its online content remains free.

TG4 will be the first outlet affected by the PBC, with the government pledging the Irish language-broadcaster will be fully funded by it within three years. The coalition also plans to increase the amount of funding given to commercial broadcasters such as TV3 and independent production companies under the Sound and Vision scheme from 7% of the licence fee to 15% over the next five years.

While the intake will be spread more widely, RTE will still be the chief beneficiary. But is its current funding model of roughly 50% licence fee and 50% advertising revenue, devised 50 years ago by Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass, still relevant in a fragmented digital age?

ALTHOUGH RTE recognises internet users now have myriad current-affairs sources at their fingertips, the broadcaster points to the recent general election as evidence of the continued popularity of public-service broadcasting.

Deploying considerable resources and personnel, RTE was able to cover the election count more comprehensively than any other news outlet, and attracted the largest share of the audience as a result. A total of 1.1m different devices logged onto rte.ie, the station’s website, with 4.5m individual views recorded on its live count-by-count constituency map. RTE argues this proves there is a role for a traditional public-service broadcaster in a multi-platform world of live streaming and social networking. Similar switches to RTE happened during other recent big news events, including the heavy snowfalls during December.

“The huge uptake of RTE’s own online services in Ireland, including streamed and replayed television programming, confirms the Irish public’s need to [access] public media via a multitude of devices,” said a spokesman for the broadcaster.

RTE points out that it has no role in deciding how revenue supporting publicly owned media should be levied, nor in deciding how those revenues are to be distributed. Montrose insists it has “no issues in principle with a change of the type proposed by the government”.

Daniel Bennett, who lives in Dublin city centre and works in finance, no longer owns a TV but believes public-service broadcasting needs to be supported. “Ireland would be worse off without RTE’s current affairs,” he said.

But will RTE be able to continue funding quality current-affairs programmes while facing greater competition from online sources and with a higher percentage of the licence-fee revenue going to other broadcasters?

Price believes it’s time to review RTE’s whole funding model and relieve it of the burden of being the state’s sole public-service broadcaster. “The reality is RTE can’t keep going the way it is,” he said.

“Reducing the percentage of the licence fee it takes, but using a PBC to put it on a better footing, could actually be of huge benefit to the broadcaster. Why should RTE have to carry all the weight on its own? It’s not healthy for them or us.”

But would the public trust other broadcasters to keep the public interest at the heart of their programmes? RTE, after all, has built up that trust over 50 years. Bennett, for example, remains a fan of its coverage. “In general it’s fair and balanced,” he said. “I know there’s an argument that a broadcaster who gets state funds will be more deferential to the government but I don’t hear that agenda when I listen to Morning Ireland.”

Meanwhile, Jim Daly will be continuing to monitor the Japanese floods on Al Jazeera rather than on Irish TV or radio. “Its coverage of the protests in the Arab world was fantastic: proper public-service broadcasting,” he said. “That, I’d pay for.”