IT IS “perhaps Britain’s greatest gift to the world”, says Kofi Annan, former boss of the UN. Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev and Aung San Suu Kyi all listened in. Yet the success of the BBC World Service, which broadcasts to nearly 200m people a week, was not inevitable. “Don’t expect too much in the early days,” warned John (later Lord) Reith, its founder, in 1932. “The programmes will neither be very interesting, nor very good.”

The World Service is still the most popular and best known of all international broadcasters—a cheap and sturdy buttress of Britain’s image abroad. Yet it is increasingly harried by competition, technological change and budget cuts. From April 1st it will no longer be funded by the Foreign Office, which has propped it up for years, but by a share of the BBC licence fee, a levy paid by all British television viewers. Cynics fear this will speed its decline.

In part the World Service’s woes are those of any incumbent media outfit, but more severe. Barriers to entry in broadcast news, colossal in the days of short-wave radio, are collapsing as FM radio and mobile phones proliferate in poor countries. In India and much of Africa, local upstarts are taking on the World Service. Particularly in cities, satellite television and the internet have left audiences fragmented. Rival state-backed broadcasters such as Al Jazeera and Iran’s Press TV crowd in.

The World Service will never again marshal the loyalty it enjoyed in its heyday, when it was the only source of plausible news for many people. But cuts have made its task more difficult still. In 2005 it provided services in 43 languages. That is down to 28. Chinese state journalists, by contrast, pump out propaganda in more than 60 tongues. In 2010 the Foreign Office cut its funding by 16%, leading to the departure of about a fifth of its staff.

It has weathered this bloodletting better than many expected. The World Service’s audience grew last year, thanks to its Arabic and Persian TV stations (see chart). It has adapted to growing competition by creating more programming for local partners to air. Its online audience, though small, is picking up.

The BBC pledges to be a benevolent guardian. Tony Hall, the corporation’s boss, talks about doubling the Beeb’s international audience to half a billion people. From April the World Service’s budget will rise by £6.5m to £245m ($406m). The licence fee might prove a more stable source of funding than government handouts, which are subject to three-yearly reviews. And the World Service’s reputation for independence should be bolstered now that it no longer relies on government cash. Digesting the World Service could also boost the BBC’s domestic broadcasting. Accounting rules have made it difficult for the organisations to share technology and staff. Gaining better access to the World Service’s reporters ought to lessen the temptation to fly “white men in suits” to hotspots, says Mark Galloway of International Broadcasting Trust, a charity. Yet assimilation risks stripping the World Service of its distinctiveness and thus its edge, says Richard Sambrook, an academic who used to run it. Others fret that—in common with many of the BBC’s international ventures—World Service radio schedules will increasingly feature ads. And the World Service’s budget might be slashed further. The licence fee has been frozen, yet it is still resented: on March 25th MPs voted in favour of a plan to decriminalise non-payment. As belts tighten, executives will find it hard to convince Britain’s fee-payers—who currently see little of the World Service’s output—that Hindi or Hausa services should be spared at the expense of domestic programming, says Nic Newman, another former staffer. MPs complain that the World Service’s boss will not sit on the BBC’s most senior management boards. In January the Foreign Affairs Committee warned that “a steady erosion” of its influence within the BBC could starve it of resources, damaging Britain’s interests in foreign lands.

Cheap at the price

That would be a mistake. The World Service looks cheap compared with the £600m the government spends on free TV licences for the elderly, and its budget is less than half that of BBC Two. Considering its reach and reputation, this is peanuts.

From April the BBC will still have to seek the Foreign Secretary’s approval to close an existing language service or launch a new one. That grants the World Service some protection from wider BBC cuts, even if this odd separation of funding from decision-making seems unsustainable in the long run. But safely guarding its international network will also hand the corporation a bargaining chip when next negotiating its royal charter, in 2016. Though critics of the licence fee would happily smash the BBC’s soaps and game shows, only its fiercest opponents want foreign broadcasts further squashed. While the World Service remains a national treasure, it is also a valuable ransom.