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Yleisradio, also known as Rundradion or the Finnish Broadcasting Company, abbreviated to Yle, is Finland's national public-broadcasting company, founded in 1926. It is a public limited 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 UK counterpart, the BBC, on which it was largely modelled.
For the greater part of Yle's existence the company was funded by the revenues obtained from a broadcast receiving licence fee payable by the owners of radio sets and television sets, as well as receiving a portion of the broadcasting licence fees payable by private television broadcasters. Since the beginning of 2013 the licence fee has been replaced by a public broadcasting tax, which is collected annually from private individuals together with their other taxes, and also from corporations.
By far the major part of the Yle tax is collected from individual taxpayers, with payments being assessed on a sliding scale. Minors, as well as persons with an annual income of less than €7,813 are exempt. At the lower limit the tax payable by individuals amounts to €50 per annum and the maximum is set at €140. The rationale for the abolition of the previous television licence 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 revenues as all channels are advertisement-free.
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