The cost of a broadcast licence

mike65

Is there one? or do the BCI award a licence to the best canditate (in thier opinion)?

djsupreme

To the best of my knowledge, there's no actual cost for the licence itself. However, even applying for the licence incurs huge costs. It wouldn't be extraordinary for a group applying for a licence to spend upwards of 150 grand on it. That's before you even make your presentation!

The start up costs are then huge, taking many years to make back. The BCI decide on who gets the licence based on a myriad of different criteria - everything from finance plans, to who owns the company, to programming plans, etc.

brettmirl

Ray Burke might be able to put a figure on that for you Mike

mike65

More Music

Take 4FM as an example.

The BCI will advertise the type of service they are proposing. They will then give format and transmission guidelines. Anybody can then submit an application.

The applicants will need:
Market research, programme and engineering consultants, accountants, banking, legal stuff, application designers and a printer!

Around 20 hard copies and an electronic version of the application are submitted to the BCI with a fee of around €20,000.

At this stage all the people previously mentioned have been paid along with the BCI fee. That could be anything up to €100,000 in total without any guarantees of securing the license.

A shortlist of applicants will then be drawn up by the BCI and oral hearings scheduled. The BCI then go underground for a few months to make their decision. Part of the BCI fee does get refunded to unsuccessful applicants.

The winner on the other hand has to come up maybe another €3 million to get the whole thing off the ground and pander to the BCI's every whim. Negotiations usually go right up to the wire with the signing of contracts only taking place weeks before the launch. Don’t forget all this time the winner is setting up studios and transmission without any contract being signed.

The above procedures are currently under review as part of the Broadcasting Bill.

mike65

One can only wonder if in 10 years when everyone has BB and the internet is seen by everyone as a "utility" (and wireless devices are in every home) if all new stations will be on-line with start up costs in the basement relativly speaking.

thecountessp

If you're talking about a community radio station licence, for instance, it's effectively free, bar the nominal application fee. What you're actually shelling out for is equipment, premises, comreg fees, insurance IMRO & PPI, and most of those come after you're given the go-ahead. You have to have a 3 year business plan and secure core funding too.
There's a massive sliding scale in this country, and allowances are made by the BCI for all different types of broadcasters.

iamhunted

imro have a webcasting agreement that, outside of having to keep detailed stats and playlists, is very simple indeed and only costs 150 euro per year for upto 165000 streams

L1011

iamhunted wrote: »

imro have a webcasting agreement that, outside of having to keep detailed stats and playlists, is very simple indeed and only costs 150 euro per year for upto 165000 streams

Pity the other side of the licence (PPI) isn't anywhere near as simple or as cheap... although for some forms of station its basically an irrelevancy - the net station I'm involved in ran for three hours solid out of the 8 I checked over without using a single track that actually had PPI rights to pay on it and only played 5 tracks that could easily be deleted from the playlist which did have those rights to pay at all.

edit: The minimum PPI licence available covers close on 550,000 streams... would be slightly over your IMRO Limited Explotation level if you hit that!

('stream' for licencing means one song listened to by one user)

iamhunted

ah haa - i must check that. i had assumed the IMRO-MCPSI Limited Online Exploitation Licence (LOEL) covered everything

iamhunted

my god - ive just been talking to PPI ... its really not worth the money trying to run a legal , non commercial webradio site

L1011

If you play non-PPI songs only the IMRO-MCPSI licence covers you. This limits you to, ooh, lots of forms of dance music and thats about it. Or PD classics...

iamhunted

i wonder if they haggle?

_feedback_

iamhunted wrote: »

my god - ive just been talking to PPI ... its really not worth the money trying to run a legal , non commercial webradio site

What kind of money were they talking?!

Nothing radio is straight forward in this country!!

iamhunted

not much in the grander scheme of things - around 550 euro per year ... but when you consider the station we run makes no money at all (plus the idea of selling advertising takes is just extra work) and - by the time you tie in server costs, IMRO, PPI etc - youre talking between 1000-1400 euro a year to run it with no comeback whatsoever. Plus, I'd say less than 10 percent of what would be played would be music at all never mind commercially released.

So in the real world, its not that much but to us, it basically just stopping our small, community based web only station from supporting music. I'm prepared to pay money, but really about half of what they are asking.

I rang again today and Im hoping the person who is meant to ring me back actually does. i was told they have nothing organised to suit web radio on its own so it might be an interesting conversation.