Commentaries: Art. 49

A contribution in accordance with Article 57 paragraph 1 RTVA shall be paid to broadcasters of radio programme services with a fee-sharing licence whose annual operating costs for broadcasting the programme service and feeding the transmission signal are extraordinarily high in relation to the number of persons covered.
DETEC shall determine the level of cost per person covered from which a broadcaster has a claim to a contribution and which services are chargeable as costs.
The available credit is split between broadcasters entitled to a contribution in relation to the cost per person covered. The basis for the calculation is the previous year’s operating costs for broadcasting and the signal feed.¹ 3bis. A contribution may amount to a maximum of one quarter of these operating costs. If the entire credit is not exhausted because of this restriction, the remaining sum is split according to the principle in paragraph 3 between those broadcasters entitled to a contribution for whom less than a quarter of their operating costs have been covered.²
If a broadcaster is entitled to a contribution, OFCOM shall determine this each year in a decision. If the broadcaster does not provide the necessary information as part of the annual report in due time (Art. 27 paragraph 7) or provides incomplete information so that the information cannot be taken into account in the calculation of contributions in accordance with para. 3, the broadcaster has no claim to a contribution for the year in question.
In a broadcaster’s first two years of operation, the basis for calculation is its budgeted expenditure for the contribution year, rounded up to a full year. If a contribution paid proves to be too high or too low on the basis of the actual costs, then a reimbursement will be made or an additional amount will be paid within the framework of the available credits.

Amended by No I of the O of 12 March 2010, in force since 1 Apr. 2010 (AS 2010 965). ↩
Inserted by No I of the O of 12 March 2010, in force since 1 Apr. 2010 (AS 2010 965). ↩

Art. 49

Footnotes