A think-tank has called for a radical overhaul of the BBC and said the Government's controversial "broadband tax" should be ditched.
In a report on the future of UK broadcasting, the Policy Exchange report called for the BBC to slash the resources it spends on sports rights, shows for 16 to 35-year-olds and popular entertainment, which it said other channels would deliver anyway.
Instead of "crowding out" commercial schemes, the report argued that the BBC management should spend up to 5% of total licence fee income on co-funding public service broadcasting (PSB) shows on other channels.
The report said there should be a greater element of competition to BBC resource allocation, both internally and externally.
It claimed, for example, the BBC could decide that investing a sum into programmes first shown on Channel 4 or E4 might be a better way of reaching 16 to 35-year-olds than spending money on BBC3.
The report called for the corporation to focus on maximising quality and distinctiveness rather than a "bias" towards chasing wide audiences.
It highlighted the reported £6 million-a-year-salary of Jonathan Ross, who announced last week that he was quitting the BBC. The report said: "The problem was not so much what the BBC paid, but what the BBC was doing in the bidding ring in the first place."
Policy Exchange called for the corporation's governing body, the BBC Trust, to be scrapped and replaced with a BBC Joint Board, while the corporation's commercial arm BBC Worldwide should be fully privatised.
It argued the Trust has not been able to hold the corporation, which has been rocked by scandals such as Sachsgate, to sufficient account. The calls come after Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw suggested last September that the Trust be abolished and said the corporation had probably reached the limits of "reasonable expansion", adding that the BBC Trust was not sustainable in the long term as "both regulator and cheerleader".
The report also said that the Government's planned "broadband tax" to fund super-fast broadband should be scrapped and funded from general taxation - if it is shown to be necessary. Meanwhile, Channel 4 should be privatised in 2012 but retain a public service broadcasting licence for at least 10 years.
