Each household in Singapore has to pay $110* a year for a Radio and TV licence. There were about 934,000 households in 2007**. That means MDA should have collected about $103 million taxes in that year.
At the same time there were 531,000 Pay TV subscribers** in the same year. With the cheapest plan on offer from StarHub set at about $25, these subscribers must have forked out at least an additional $13.3 million dollars a month. That's about $160 million for the year.
A large part of the Radio and TV licence goes to Mediacorp and other media owners for creating free-to-air programming. Mediacorp takes care of eight TV stations and 14 radio stations. Mediacorp also makes money from advertisers.
Enough facts, let the ranting begin.
I am not the first one to question the amount of money that goes into paying for a licence to watch TV and listen to the radio. The complaints got louder since Starhub with its cable TV started to fill out screens with more entertaining fare to keep us up at night. We all get 8 free-to-air channels. I am paying for an additional 42 channels on cable and personally, spend way more time watching cable programming than Mediocrecorp crap. So should we pay for the right to have TV in our homes, pay for free-to-air broadcasting and pay again to the cable TV operator? I know some of you don't even listen to radio anymore, and others don't watch TV because you get your fix from Youtube and other Internet media sources. If you don't use it, you shouldn't have to pay for it.
Someone's gotta talk about this more. Apart from makan, there's little else to do but watch TV and worry about $.
*http://www.mda.gov.sg/wms.www/devnpolicies.aspx?sid=185
**Statistics Singapore (http://www.singstat.gov.sg/pubn/reference/sif2008.pdf)
2 comments:
well ranted, eloquently spoken! i am in full support of this rant. i do not watch TV or listen to radio. i don't even have cable. i refuse to pay for programming that violates my intelligence level. especially the mediacrap stuff - i mean seriously, for ever producing VR Man, they should have had their broadcast license revoked. don't even get me started on the archiac "values" their mandarin rubbish promotes... ENOUGH OF THIS MADNESS...
1 broadcaster, Mediacorp. What to expect? Unless there's another broadcaster, not like the other time the SPH "U" & "i" channels, but overseas broadcaster from British, American or even Taiwan, China and Japan? Then we might have a better chance of better TV programs. Competition is good and healthy but then again, that will open another can of worms. Socially and politically. I guess Singapore is just too small. I do agree, Mediacorp programs suck big time. And when it comes to festival seasons, they are mostly repeated programs. Worse, they get programs from cables!
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