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Revenues
The Italian television market in recent
years has been aligning itself with
longstanding trends throughout Europe,
with an increasing amount of revenue
from fee-based services joining public
funding and advertising revenues.
In this landscape, the licence fee,
despite rising in comparison with the
previous year (+1.6%), shows a gradual
decline in comparison to total revenues
for the system.
Already, the inflows generated by the
various forms of pay TV have exceeded
funding from the licence fee.
Historically, the parameter used to adapt
public funding has been the
programmed inflation rate, and not the
actual rate of inflation, meaning that not
only does it not allow the concession
holder to recover the entire effect of
inflation within the Italian economy, it
also fails to consider the significant
pressure on production created by the
increased level of competition within the
marketplace that has been growing for
several years now.
In a context of such competitiveness, the
Italian licence fee remains the lowest in
Western Europe.
It should also be noted that in Italy,
despite the steps Rai has taken to limit
these effects, reliable estimates point to
a significantly high rate of evasion with
reference to both the ordinary licence
fee and the special fee, the latter
approaching 30% far and away the
highest in Europe, where the average
rate of evasion is 10%, with a low of 5%
in the U.K. In this area, we would like to
see the introduction of legislative
measures that would increase the
efficacy of actions to combat evasion, measures that Rai has requested from
the competent public bodies on
numerous occasions.
The Italian television system will,
however, continue to be funded
primarily through advertising revenues,
although we are seeing progressive
growth in revenues from pay TV on one
hand and a shift towards investments in
other emerging media on the other.
The gradual decline of revenues from
television advertising in recent years is
common to the main public service
broadcasters throughout Europe,
although audience figures continue to
remain quite stable.