The British broadcasting system is heavily influenced by public service broadcasting (PSB) concepts and regulation. The debate over PSB has raged for decades and has to varying degrees been based on the proposition that there are myriad market failures in the provision of broadcast television...

In the past, the use of a compulsory levy on television sets (a licence fee) to finance the BBC could be justified given the problem of spectrum scarcity and the fact that television signals were a public good (i.e. there was effectively a zero marginal cost of an additional user receiving the...