The BBC, due to our rapidly swelling love for streaming video and other Internet TV services, will fire 1,000 staff.

According to the BBC, income from the TV licence fee for 2016/2017 is now forecast to be £150 million (€210 million) less than in 2011, "because as more people use iPlayer, mobiles and online catch-up, the number of households owning televisions is falling." The BBC doesn't directly mention Netflix, YouTube, and other online video services, but they are certainly part of the equation.

The £150 million shortfall will be amortised through "more than 1,000" job cuts (about 5 percent of the BBC's global workforce), plus further reductions in management roles and merging of similar teams across the Digital, Engineering, and Worldwide divisions of the company. Currently there are up to 10 layers of people and management within the BBC, but that will be reduced to a maximum of seven to cut costs.

It isn't like the BBC is currently inefficient, either. Today's press release cites a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that found the BBC to be one of the most efficient companies in the public and regulated private sectors: overhead costs were just 7 percent, compared to the public sector average of 11.2 percent.

The larger problem, of course, is the ongoing shift in media consumption habits—people are watching less broadcast television, and so they're not buying a TV licence—and that the price of a TV licence has been frozen for the last seven years. The other issue is that the TV licence hasn't been properly modernised to cover digital services: you can use the on-demand BBC iPlayer without a TV licence, for example.

Ultimately, the BBC finds itself in a rather uncomfortable position. It is exceedingly unlikely that income from the TV licence fee will increase in the future. There is also a distinct possibility that the TV licence will be scrapped altogether: the UK's new culture secretary, John Whittingdale, has previously made it very clear that he's not a fan: “In the long term it is unsustainable ... I think in the longer term we are potentially looking at reducing at least a proportion of the licence fee that is compulsory and introducing an element of choice."

The BBC's charter will be renegotiated later this year, which will stand for the next decade. It's not expected that the TV licence will be axed this time around, but some tweaks will probably be made.