Yleisradio Oy (Finnish, literally "General Radio Ltd." or "General Broadcast Ltd."; abbr. Yle [ˈyle]; Swedish: Rundradion Ab), 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 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 (1927–1976) and television sets (1958–2012), 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 Since the beginning of 2013 the licence fee has been replaced by a public broadcasting tax (known as the Yle tax), which is collected annually from private individuals and corporations together with their other taxes.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 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 (payable by an individual with a yearly income of €20,588 or more) 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.
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 2018 Yle's annual budget was about €530 million.Yle operates three national television channels, 13 radio channels and services, and 25 regional radio stations. As Finland is constitutionally bilingual — around 5.5% of the population speaks Swedish as their mother-tongue — Yle provides radio and TV programming in Swedish through its Swedish-language department, Svenska Yle. As is customary in Finnish television and cinemas, foreign films and TV programmes, as well as segments of local programmes that feature foreign language dialogues (e.g. news interviews), are generally subtitled on Yle's channels. Dubbing is used in cartoons intended for young children who have not yet learned to read; off-screen narration in documentaries is also frequently dubbed.In the field of international broadcasting, one of Yle's best known services was Nuntii Latini, the news in Latin, which was broadcast worldwide and made available over the Internet.
Yle was one of 23 founding broadcasting organisations of the European Broadcasting Union in 1950. Yle hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 2007 in Helsinki.
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