@
Gibbon Well, you can't have something for nothing, can you? Especially a service you are effectively importing from overseas. Likely a goodly part of that $9 goes to the Internet service run by US companies, not all to the BBC.
There are Britons who resent paying the relatively very low "subscription" to the BBC - the fee's old, official name, "Television Licence" does not help. I wonder how many of these who want their leisure funded by everyone else, happily pay considerably more for very limited, one-theme, heavily-padded, subscription television services. Such as the very narrow-minded sports channels they might watch on the huge screens in local pub - if they still have a local pub.
(The TV Licence will be £180 a year from April. That is £15/month, or £3.75/week; for a vast range of TV and radio programmes and material, without advertising breaks and external control. A pint of beer in that pub costs nearer, or even over, £5.)
I don't know the situation for BBC Radio overseas.
We who have only a radio within the UK, with no television, don't pay and I am acutely aware the licence-payers are funding our enjoyment. So I'd not begrudge a slightly higher "Licence" of, say £200 / yr for TV + Radio, and perhaps £40 / yr Radio-only; but it would be very difficult to administer.
That was done many decades ago but as with dog-licences, the wireless licence was allowed to slip until it was more expensive to administer than it raised, and it was scrapped.
The commercial "local" radio stations in the UK are numerically very few, inreality. They mainly broadcast only wall-to-wall strings of pop records assembled by spreadsheet-jockeys in central companies, and padded with brief, local news and the inane advertising that funds them, and given names to suggest being local. Governed by cheapness, they support no new talent, carry no special-interest programmes, News and current-affairs, investigative-journalism, drama, comedy, quiz shows, etc. It's just supermarket-ceiling stuff.
Even Classic FM, which pretends to compete with BBC Radio Three in the vast "classical music" world , is basically a "play-list" collator of the safe and familiar so as not to frighten its advertising-agency pay-masters; and it commissions or supports little if any new work, the
avant-garde, new performers and live performances.
I am afraid, as they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
I don't begrudge paying for my information and entertainments, including occasional tickets to public lectures or concerts. I would not begrudge even a full TV Licence. I choose to have no television but do know others are funding my choices from the BBC's
five very different FM broadcast radio channels and several DAB ones.
So you can't really complain!
