3.40pm: BB: BBC and Channel 4: Govt supports long-term licence fee settlements.
He hung on, but the last two licence fee settlements, that year and in 2015, have each resulted in effective reductions of 20% of the BBC budget.
Yet there are signs of change; not just in BBC budgets, hit by repeated licence fee settlements and unable to compete with the sorts of sums offered by subscription-based rivals, but also in the way viewers watch television.
In some ways more significant still (although Thompson and some of his senior team don't accept this) re-securing the BBC's independence, after a series of licence fee settlements that have seen successive governments treat it as a sinking fund for their own use, is absolutely critical.
"At the same time, we do not believe that there is significant scope to recover the effective underfunding of fee settlements from previous years and we do not therefore foresee a material positive transformation in [profits] performance over the next 12 to 24 months.
Google is just one of many technology companies involved in patent lawsuits which seek to slow down competition or strike lucrative licensing fee settlements.
