Britain’s public service broadcasters spend around £156 million a year beaming Freeview through the air to your aerial, at the same time as paying to deliver those same channels over the internet.
That figure comes from new research published today by Everyone TV, the organisation behind Freeview, Freesat and Freely. It was carried out by media analysts Oliver & Ohlbaum, and released ahead of a panel discussion at the Edinburgh TV Festival.
Most of the report is about production companies – who makes British telly, who pays for it, and what would happen to that if the broadcasters funding it got weaker.
But run through it, and you get something more familiar to Cord Busters readers: a fairly candid account of why the people running free TV in this country are in such a hurry to switch your aerial off.
The report ends by backing a move to internet-delivered TV in 2034, the earlier of the two dates the government is considering, with Everyone TV saying it believes a 2034 transition will best help it deliver free TV to everyone.
The consultation on that decision closes at 11:59pm on August 31, five days from now.
Along the way it sets out how much money is draining out of free television, what that means for the channels you watch, and why Freely getting onto as many devices as possible matters far more to the broadcasters than it might look from the outside.
£156 Million A Year To Keep The Aerial Working
If you’ve not been following this story, here’s the short version.
Freeview brings BBC One, ITV, Channel 4, 5 and dozens of other channels into your home through the aerial on your roof, with no bill beyond the TV Licence. Freesat does the same job through a satellite dish.
Freely, launched in April 2024, does it over your broadband connection instead – same channels, no aerial, and it’s the service built to eventually take over from both.
In June, the government published a green paper setting out two dates for the end of Freeview: December 31, 2034, or a time-limited extension to December 31, 2044.
It said there was a compelling case for the earlier date, while asking for views on whether the extension to 2044 is needed.
The broadcasters’ argument for going sooner has always been that they’re funding two delivery systems at once – the transmitter network and the internet – for a shrinking terrestrial audience.
That’s been the shape of the case for a while. What this research adds is the number: around £156 million a year across the public service broadcasters, spent on getting channels to aerials, running in parallel with what they spend getting the same channels to smart TVs and streaming boxes.
The report’s position is that switching off would let that money be redirected into programmes and services instead.
It cites government stakeholder papers on the 2034-to-2044 question as its source, which tells you the figure is already circulating inside the process rather than being introduced to it.
Whether £156 million is a lot depends on what you set it against. It’s more than the £121 million deficit the BBC ran last year, which is currently driving cuts. It’s also a fraction of the near-£4 billion the licence fee brings in annually, spread across several broadcasters.
I’d suggest holding both of those in mind, because the figure will be quoted in support of switching off, and it’s worth knowing its size in context.
The cost that doesn’t appear in that calculation is the one at your end. The green paper makes no promise of public money to help people get online, unlike the analogue switchover between 2008 and 2012, which relied on significant public investment.
For anyone who doesn’t otherwise want the internet, broadband is a new bill of roughly £27 a month to carry on watching telly they currently get for nothing.
Why The Money Argument Has Got Louder
The research is blunt about the state of the finances behind free TV.
Commercial public service broadcasters’ linear advertising revenue fell 13% to £2.2 billion in 2025 as viewing moved online and on demand.
BBC income is around a quarter lower in real terms than at the start of the current Charter, a drop of about £1.2 billion. And the report puts licence take-up at 80% of households in 2025/26, down from more than 90% in 2016/17.
That last one lines up with what we found in the BBC’s own annual accounts in July, when 539,000 homes dropped their licence in a single year, and the corporation’s internal risk assessment described its funding model as not sustainable.
The money coming into free British television is falling, and it’s falling from several directions at once.
Now put that next to the audience side. Forecasts published by Everyone TV in June, from analysts 3 Reasons, predict Freeview falling to under a million main sets by 2034, down from 9.7 million today, with Freely climbing to 10.5 million households.
Last month, Everyone TV reported Freely passing two million monthly users during the World Cup, with broadband-only viewing of England’s group games up 473% on the 2022 tournament.
Fewer viewers using the aerial, less money coming in, and a transmitter network that costs roughly the same either way.
The cost per remaining viewer climbs every year that passes. That’s the mechanism behind the push for 2034, and it’s a coherent argument even if you don’t like where it leads.
The counterweight, which we’ve written about before, is that the shrinking number of people left on the aerial cuts both ways. A forecast that barely anyone will be stranded is also a forecast that the old system is easier to switch off.
What The Money Actually Buys
The bulk of the report is dedicated to a different question: what British television would lose if the broadcasters funding it got weaker.
Take Adolescence, the Netflix drama that swept up eight Emmys, six BAFTAs and four Golden Globes. The report traces nearly everyone who made it back to public service television.
Stephen Graham, its star and co-writer, came up through This Is England on Channel 4 and Line of Duty on the BBC. Co-writer Jack Thorne got his breaks on Skins and This Is England ’86.
Erin Doherty came through Call the Midwife and Chloe. Director Philip Barantini had directed the Boiling Point series for BBC One. Warp Films, the Yorkshire company that produced it, was built on Channel 4 commissions.
The same pattern shows up elsewhere. Merman, founded by Sharon Horgan and Clelia Mountford, started with Catastrophe on Channel 4 in 2015 and Motherland on BBC Two the year after.
It now makes Bad Sisters for Apple TV, Divorce for HBO and Vladimir for Netflix. The 1% Club began on ITV in 2022 and has since been licensed into 15 territories.
The broader figures back the pattern up. Public service broadcasters accounted for 71% of UK original content investment in 2024 – £2.8 billion of £3.9 billion – and 85% of all original hours in 2025.
Around 40% of all UK producer revenue comes from their commissioning fees, the single largest source. They’ve commissioned 602 new production labels over the past decade, 79 of which now turn over more than £10 million a year, and 63% of their hours are made outside London.
Jonathan Thompson, chief executive of Everyone TV, said the sector’s global success was built on a system that takes creative risks and gives companies across the country the chance to grow.
Mark Oliver, chairman of Oliver & Ohlbaum, described the broadcasters as anchor investors in UK production, and said the stresses were showing as budgets came under pressure at a time of higher costs.
Prominence Is The Real Prize
There’s another thread in the report worth pulling out, because it explains something readers ask us about constantly.
Among the pressures it lists on the public service broadcasters are two that have nothing to do with transmitters. One is prominence – the risk that their services and content become harder to find on newer platforms and connected devices.
The other is fragmented viewing, with broadcasters having to distribute across a growing range of platforms at growing cost.
Both of those matter more, not less, once the aerial goes. An aerial delivers BBC One at number one and asks nothing of anybody.
A broadband future means free British TV arriving through hardware somebody else owns and designs – a smart TV, a streaming box, a stick – where placement is somebody else’s decision.
The government isn’t leaving that entirely to the market. The Media Act 2024 created a new prominence regime for the internet age, and Ofcom is still working through the details of how it will apply to connected TVs and streaming devices.
Broadly, the most-used platforms will have to make sure the public service apps are easy to find, and the final rules are expected later this year.
That’s a real protection, but look closely at what it actually covers. The rules are about the broadcasters’ own apps – iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4, 5. They say nothing about Freely.
So Amazon, for instance, could put iPlayer right at the front of the Fire TV home screen, tick every box the regulator asks for, and still never put Freely on a Fire TV stick.
You’d get the apps. You wouldn’t get the guide that puts all the live channels in one place with a proper number ordering, which is the bit that makes Freely feel like television rather than a folder full of apps.
Which is why Freely matters so much to the people behind it, and why the push to make it work is about more than replacing an aerial.
Freely is the one place where the broadcasters own the shop floor. On a box like the Manhattan Aero or the Netgem Pleio, the guide you land in is theirs, the channel order is theirs, and nobody else is deciding how far down the page BBC One sits.
The alternative is the situation we already have on the most popular streaming device in the country. Amazon sells Fire TV televisions with Freely built in, but Fire TV sticks don’t carry it.
When I asked Aidan Marcuss, Amazon’s vice president of Fire TV, about that in June, he said he was proud of the Freely work on TVs but couldn’t commit to plans for the sticks.
Prominence rules wouldn’t change that – they would get iPlayer and ITVX onto the home screen, and leave Freely exactly where it is.
Then there’s ownership, which adds one more wrinkle. Sarah Clarke, chief operating officer of ITV Media & Entertainment, is quoted in the report saying the public service system is under threat and that broadcasters and producers share an interest in strengthening it.
ITV Media & Entertainment is the division Sky agreed to buy in July, in a deal worth up to £1.6 billion and expected to complete in the second half of 2027.
Everyone TV is jointly owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5, and it isn’t yet clear whether ITV’s stake there passes to Sky.
Sky, meanwhile, sells Sky Stream, which delivers live channels over broadband and does much of what a Freely box does.
Where This Goes Next
The consultation closes on August 31, and the government has said it will publish its decision in a white paper later this year. That decision – 2034 or 2044 – is the one that determines whether the aerial on your roof has eight years left or eighteen.
Running alongside it is the Charter Review, which will settle what the TV Licence becomes from 2028. The two collide in an obvious way: the licence is currently triggered by watching live TV or using BBC iPlayer, and once every channel arrives down the same broadband pipe as everything else, that distinction becomes considerably harder to draw.
Everyone TV has been clear about where it stands for a while now, and this research doesn’t change that so much as put more weight behind it – the production industry, the exports, the regional studios, all lined up behind the same 2034 date it was already backing.
What’s still missing is the other half of it. There’s a plan for when the aerial goes and a case for why, but no answer yet on what a household without broadband is supposed to do, what happens to Freesat, or what you’ll be paying for once every channel arrives down the same pipe. Those get decided in the white paper.
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