Florence Hartmann leads the Media Intelligence Service (MIS), the research department of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in Geneva, Switzerland. Before taking up this position in 2021, she worked as a Senior Media Analyst at MIS for eight years. She holds a PhD in the Economics of International Relations from Sciences Po Paris, where she worked as a research assistant and lecturer. Before joining the EBU, she worked as an analyst for the European Audiovisual Observatory (EAO) in Strasbourg. She serves as Industry Liaison Officer in the IAPMR Leadership Team. At MIS, her research foci include funding and competition issues of PSM.
You are in charge of the yearly EBU reports on PSM funding. Could you identify some overarching funding trends across the EBU area over the past ten years?
PSM funding has been characterized over the past decade by years of prolonged stagnation followed by a sharp inflation shock.
Between 2014 and 2021, PSM funding in the EBU area was essentially flat, with average annual growth of just +1.1%, amounting in practice to a near-freeze. This fragile equilibrium was then disrupted by the surge in inflation: prices rose by 3.7% in 2021, 12.2% in 2022 and 7.9% in 2023 across the EBU area. In 2024, we noticed nominal increases in PSM funding in some countries, but these catch-ups have not compensated the inflation peaks encountered between 2021 and 2023.
Overall, this results in a drop of 10.9% in PSM funding in real terms between 2014 and 2023. Concretely, at the organizational level rather than the aggregated EBU trend, between 2014 and 2024, half of EBU markets experienced a decline in PSM funding, once adjusted for inflation, pointing to structural erosion of their financial capacity.
At the same time, PSM are expected to fulfill expanding missions: from digital transformation, building responsible AI, investing in European creation, combating disinformation and building resilience for times of crisis, but all of this with fewer resources in real terms.
From a normative perspective, the licence fee is often praised as an ideal funding model of PSM, as it establishes a direct link between citizens and PSM. However, several countries have abandoned this model in recent decades, and others have at least considered doing so. From your perspective, what are advantages and disadvantages of the licence fee model, and does it have a future?
The licence fee remains a cornerstone of PSM funding in Europe and one of the strongest funding models in normative terms, because it ticks all the key principles of public funding for PSM: it is stable, transparent, universal and, importantly, relatively independent from political interference. It also creates a direct relationship between citizens and public service media, which reinforces accountability and legitimacy.
Despite recent abolitions, the license fee remains the principal funding source for public service media in Europe, accounting for 44% of the total funding mix. Its challenge today is not conceptual, but practical. In several countries, the licence fee has struggled to keep pace with changing media consumption habits. This has sometimes weakened collection efficiency.
However, this does not mean the model is obsolete. In many cases, the issue is less about replacing the licence fee than adapting it. Where these adjustments are made, for instance when turning the fee into a household charge, the model remains highly robust and efficient.
More broadly, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Other public funding models can also work well. The key is to ensure that the right safeguards for independence, stability and adequacy. The question is therefore not whether to keep or abolish the licence fee, but whether the chosen system, whatever it is, is fit for purpose and properly protected.
Speaking about safeguards, how would these need to be designed to function well? Could you share any best practices here?
Yes, safeguards are absolutely critical – often more important than the model itself. What matters is that funding is stable, predictable and shielded from short-term political decisions. The design of safeguards really depends on the funding model. For state-budget funding, the priority is to reduce political exposure: this means multi-year funding cycles, references to objective macro indicators (like GDP or tax revenues), and ideally indexation to inflation to avoid erosion. Countries like Norway (four-year framework) or Lithuania (formula linked to tax revenues) show how this can work in practice.
For the licence fee, the challenge is different: ensuring the system remains flexible and regularly updated. This means periodic reviews of the fee level and adapting its scope to new forms of consumption. The shift to household charges in Germany, Switzerland, or Austria is a good example of how the model can be modernized rather than abandoned.
Across all models, the key idea is the same: funding should rely on clear, transparent, rule-based mechanisms, not ad hoc political decisions.
Apart from independence, the EBU public funding principles also state that PSM funding should be fair and justifiable, transparent and accountable as well as stable and adequate. Can you share any recent trends concerning whether states guarantee these principles?
It’s a mixed picture overall. On fairness, transparency and accountability, PSM are largely delivering. Transparency requirements have clearly increased, and many PSM go very far: detailed financial reporting, public value reports, audits. Broadcasters like the BBC, ZDF, SRG SSR, or more recently France Télévisions, are pushing this quite far. This level of transparency is actually remarkable when you compare it to the opacity that still characterizes global platforms.
Where we see more pressure is on adequacy and stability. In practice, many countries are freezing fees, removing indexations or cutting allocations, which erodes funding. It would be impossible to list all cases, but we already see significant cuts being implemented or planned: for example at the BBC (up to GBP 700 million in savings), RAI (–2% in 2026 and –4% in 2027), France Télévisions (around EUR 85 million cut in 2026), or SRG SSR, with a planned 10% reduction of the licence fee by 2029. At the same time, funding freezes are becoming widespread, affecting countries like Austria, Belgium, Finland, Lithuania and Sweden. And with the shift towards state-budget funding, PSM are increasingly exposed to political cycles. That’s precisely why strong safeguards and frameworks like the EMFA are becoming increasingly important.
The share of public income in the total budget varies across PSM organizations. In its Green Paper for the BBC Charter Review, the UK Government stated that it intends to explore a range of options to support the BBC to generate more commercial revenue. From a general perspective, what are the pros and cons of increasing the proportion of commercial revenue in PSM funding?
Increasing commercial revenues can be part of the solution, but it has clear limits. On the positive side, it can diversify income sources, reduce pressure on public budgets, and give PSM more flexibility to invest and innovate. Many PSM are already developing activities like content sales or partnerships to complement their funding. Today, commercial revenues represent around 20% of total PSM funding in the EBU area.
But commercial revenues are inherently volatile and uncertain, and they tend to follow market cycles. Advertising in particular is not a very dynamic source of growth, so it is unlikely to provide significant additional resources. Expanding advertising can also create tensions with private media players. More importantly, increasing reliance on commercial income can create tension with the public service remit, especially if it pushes PSM towards more commercial content or priorities. So in practice, commercial income can complement, but not replace, public funding, which remains the only stable and predictable foundation for PSM.