Bulgaria

[BG] On-budget subsidies for public media

IRIS 2016-3:1/6

Rayna Nikolova

New Bulgarian University

On 12 January 2016, Decree No. 380 of 29 December 2015, implementing the state budget of the Republic of Bulgaria for 2016, was promulgated in State Gazette, issue 3/2016. The State Budget Act was promulgated in the State Gazette, issue 96/2015 on 9 December 2015. The State Budget Act provides for an on-budget subsidy for the Bulgarian National Radio of BGN 42,112,000 (~ EUR 21.530.000) and an on-budget subsidy for the Bulgarian National Television of BGN 65,147,000 (EUR 33.310.000) according to Article 1, paragraph 2. The sum of the state funding received has not changed in comparison to the previous year.

Public suppliers of media services are  funded by: a subsidy of the state budget; own proceeds from advertising and sponsorship; and proceeds from additional radio- and TV related activities, etc. (Article 70, paragraph 3 of the Radio and Television Act.) The subsidy from the state budget is for the preparation, creation and broadcast of national and regional programmes. The subsidy is determined on the basis of a rate per one hour of programme which is approved by the Council of Ministers. Furthermore, the subsidy from the state budget is a targeted subsidy to obtain and for major repair of long-term assets as per a list annually approved by the Minister of Finance (Article 70, paragraph 4). By virtue of the Decree No. 380 of 29 December 2015, the Council of Ministers approved a rate of BGN 1,628 (~ EUR 820) per one hour of programme  for the Bulgarian National Television to prepare, create and broadcast national and regional programmes (Article 6), and a rate of BGN 410 (~ EUR 210) per one hour of programme for the Bulgarian National Radio to prepare, create and broadcast national and regional programmes (Article 7).

Pursuant to Article 90 of the Act, the total duration of advertising for any individual programme may not exceed 15 minutes per 24 hours and four minutes per hour for Bulgarian National Television (BNT), and six minutes per hour for Bulgarian National Radio (BNR). The Bulgarian National Television has the right to use up to one third of the total volume of advertising time for 24 hours within the time zone 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. With the introduction of digitization at the end of 2013, BNT closed its four regional programmes due to the lack of any private investor’s interest to develop a regional multiplex broadcasting these programmes. They were replaced by the national programme BNT2, uniting the production of these regional centres.