Yle

Yleisradio Oy (Public Radio, Ltd.; Rundradion Ab), abbreviated as Yle (ˈyle) and translated to English as the Finnish Broadcasting Company, is Finland's national public broadcasting company, founded in 1926. It is a joint-stock company which is 99.98% owned by the Finnish state, and employs around 3,200 people in Finland. Yle shares many of its organizational characteristics with its British counterpart, the BBC, on which it was largely modeled. Yle was long funded by revenues obtained from a broadcast receiving license fee payable by the owners of radio sets (1927–1976) and television sets (1958–2012), as well as receiving a portion of the broadcasting license fees payable by private television broadcasters. Since 2013, the license fee has been replaced by a public broadcasting tax (known as the Yle tax), collected annually from private individuals and corporations together with their other taxes. By far the largest part of the Yle tax is collected from individual taxpayers, with payments assessed on a sliding scale. Minors and those with an annual income less than €7,813 are exempt. At the lower limit the tax payable by individuals is €50 per annum and the maximum (payable by an individual with a yearly income of €20,588 or more) is €140. The rationale for the abolition of the television license fee was the development of other means of delivering Yle's services, such as the Internet, and the consequent impracticality of continuing to tie the fee to the ownership of a specific device. Yle receives no advertising revenue, as all channels are advertisement-free. Yle has a status that could be described as that of a non-departmental public body. It is governed by a parliamentary governing council. Yle's turnover in 2010 was €398.4 million. In 2022, Yle's annual budget was about €560 million. Yle operates three national television channels, 13 radio channels and services, and 25 regional radio stations. As Finland is constitutionally bilingual—around 5.