The argument can now be pulled together. Licence fee money finances less than a quarter of the UK's television output; it is less important than advertising revenue and much smaller than the subscriptions collected by BSkyB. In the digital era, and particularly now that iPhones and Android devices have become commonplace, the licence fee no longer has a readily defined tax base and is increasingly impractical to collect. Moreover, in the run-up to its financing review the BBC is being criticised by many politicians for bias of one kind or another, and the licence fee does not command the popular support that it once did. On top of all these domestic UK arguments against the licence fee, sooner or later international pressure against state subsidies will lead to its attenuation or abolition. To summarise, the licence fee is unsustainable in the long run. Public policy needs to be organised now, ahead of the next Royal Charter and "licensing round", to promote a healthier 100 per cent market-based system of financing British broadcasting. Indeed, perhaps the very ideas of a Royal Charter and a licensing round should be thrown into the dustbin of history. 

Let us suppose that the licence fee is scrapped in due course. What, then, is to become of the BBC? At present the licence fee represents about 70 per cent of the BBC's total income. Unless the BBC is to contract dramatically, that money will have to be replaced by a combination of subscription money, advertising revenue and other income-generating sources. Obviously, a transitional period in which the BBC receives a government grant is to be expected. Also obviously, that government grant would be unfair on BSkyB, ITV and other broadcasting businesses if it were to persist for any length of time. Eventually, all the UK's broadcasting businesses and also — let us not forget — all its up-and-coming narrowcasting businesses must compete on the same level playing field. 

Could the BBC remain in public ownership? Could it be a publicly owned entity subject to market pressures and required to generate a decent return on capital, and still somehow operating with the remit of a "public service broadcaster"? In theory that could be envisaged. However, in practice the notion is almost as obsolete and ludicrous as the licence fee is fast becoming. As a nationalised industry, with an implicit state guarantee on its debts, the BBC would have an advantage over its privately owned competitors in fund-raising. On the other hand, its nationalised status would make it answerable to the government of the day in a financial sense and to parliament in more general terms. Its management would not have the same freedoms — to buy and sell other businesses, to hire and fire staff, to expand or contract in foreign jurisdictions — as its commercial rivals. Once the licence fee has gone, the privatisation of the BBC must inevitably follow. 

For the time being, the conclusions just drawn — that the licence fee is finished and that the BBC must be privatised — are not part of the established policy consensus. However, the main lines of the analysis are so straightforward that they must be familiar to the key decision-takers in Ofcom and the BBC itself. In a speech in the BBC Radio Theatre on October 8 the current director-general, Lord Hall, highlighted the corporation's move into the tablet era by praising the BBC's iPlayer, which is to be "reinvented" in 2014 and made "more bespoke" so that it becomes "the best in the world". The BBC's news audience, now put at 250 million people, is to be doubled to 500 million by 2022. Hall applauded "the UK's amazing array of arts and science institutions" and said that it would be the BBC's job "to reach new audiences across the globe" for these institutions. The BBC is even apparently to move into corporate finance, as it offers "risk capital to the UK's creative industries". In an earlier and yet more eye-catching announcement at the end of August, Hall had eulogised Google and California's Silicon Valley for their speed of decision-taking.

All of which is excellent, except that it cannot be reconciled with the BBC in receipt of a state subsidy and hamstrung by Royal Charter commitments as a public service broadcaster. The BBC has itself acknowledged that the owners of devices using the iPlayer do not have to pay the licence fee. That may be the thin end of a wedge, but it is a massive wedge that has been opened up. Any loudly-proclaimed ambition to be "best in the world" must be of interest, and perhaps concern, to unsubsidised broadcasters in other countries. No doubt the BBC still has a great reputation internationally for the impartiality of its news broadcasting, but how is the broadcasting of news to hundreds of millions of people outside Britain to be financed?