The radio and television license fee for next year, when Croatia is set to replace its currency kuna with the euro, will remain unchanged at 80 kuna (€10.60) per month, or 960 kuna (€127) per year per household, the state broadcasted HRT told the state news agency Hina on Wednesday.

This was confirmed in a meeting of the state’s Electronic Media Council at its session held in late November. The license fee, mandated by law to be paid to HRT for every television set or radio device, has remained unchanged since 2010.

The news comes after the head of HRT, Robert Sveb, spoke at a session of the the company’s programming council in November about “the need to restore the relevance of public radio and television” and announced exploring ideas to arrive to a new “fee collection model,” Hina said.

“HRT has lost a large chunk of its audience over the last two decades. According to surveys, a quarter of Croatia’s population does not consume HRT services every week, or even never or at all. This has significantly hurt the credibility of HRT among the general public, as well as the understanding of the reasoning behind its public funding,” Sveb said.

Sveb was appointed to head the state broadcaster in October 2021 by a vote in Parliament dominated by MPs of the ruling HDZ party. The vote came after his predecessor, Kazimir Bacic, was arrested earlier in 2021 in a corruption investigation, with prosecutors alleging that he had acted as a middleman in suspicious real estate dealings between a local businessman and the former Zagreb mayor Milan Bandic. Bacic had also been appointed to by HDZ-led Parliament in February 2017.

At the same meeting in November, Sveb also talked about “the shortcomings of the current radio and television subscription fee model,” which “have become increasingly noticeable.” HRT, which was given the authority to collect the fee decades ago, traditionally employs fee collectors who patrol apartment buildings looking for people who might own TV or radio sets without paying up the license fee.

It is thought that HRT collects about 1.2 billion kuna (€160 million) in license fees every year, with close to 70 percent used to fund its own operating costs while the remainder is given to other state institutions in charge of subsidizing smaller media outlets and film production companies.

“The outdated fee system which is based on the number of TV sets has great limitations and creates a negative image. There are fewer and fewer households in Croatia, and the percentage of people who opt out from paying the license fee is increasing. A similar trend is seen across Europe. The time has come to move away from the old model and adopt another one that we shall propose to the lawmakers,” Sveb reportedly said, without clarifying what kind of alternatives he had in mind.