Avenir Suisse wants reform of media funding

The new Avenir Suisse discussion paper proposes a reform agenda with short-term measures to prevent the excessive expansion of SRG and longer-term measures to promote content rather than technology:

In the short term, the crowding-out effect should be reduced by financing SRG fees. Avenir Suisse proposes two instruments for this purpose. On the one hand, a procedure should examine whether (new) SRG offerings comply with the public mandate and to what extent they impact on the private media sector - in terms of distortion of competition and crowding out of private offerings. On the other hand, SRG's commitment should be subject to a revenue cap - a so-called "revenue cap" for fee and advertising revenue. This would mean linking the fees to a price index and linking the maximum advertising revenue to the aggregated private media budgets, as Urs Meister, project manager at Avenir Suisse and co-author of the discussion paper on media funding, told the media in Zurich on Thursday.

In the longer term, both the promotion of private media and the organization of the SRG should be redesigned from the ground up. At the center of Avenir Suisse's proposal is the SRG, as a "public content provider".

The "public content provider"

Avenir Suiss proposes a transformation of SRG into a "public content provider" as a longer-term measure. This does not have its own distribution platform and is not profit-oriented. It makes its content available to third parties. In this scenario, the content provider would be purely fee-financed, but would no longer have a performance mandate. SRG would continue to produce content in accordance with a program mandate in the four national languages, but would now make this content available to various end customers. The end customers could then add their own productions to this content. However, they would no longer receive any funding for this.

However, as such a proposal could exceed the limits of political feasibility, Avenir Suisse proposes the creation of an equally non-profit "private content provider" as an interim solution. This can be imagined as a further development of today's SDA, producing text, image, video and audio content in all four national languages. In contrast to the "Public Content Provider", however, the "Private Content Provider" would not have a performance mandate. The provider would be supported by private media, for example in a cooperative organization. However, a proposal on the specific weighting of the private media has not yet been worked out in detail, according to Meister.

According to the Avenir Suisse model, private media would benefit from media funding through the "public content provider", regardless of their technology (print, broadcasting, online), as they would be able to take over and redistribute fee-financed content free of charge. Subsidy-related market distortions would be minimized and media funding would be unified under one model.