The financial absurdity of BTV

The mathematics of Bangladesh Television have long ceased to compute, but the latest balance sheet suggests a terminal decoupling from reality. 

In the first eleven months of the last fiscal year, BTV consumed 254 crore taka ($21.3 million) in public funds while generating a meager 8 crore taka in revenue. This yields a spending-to-revenue ratio of nearly 32 to 1. For an economy wrestling with structural fiscal strains, this is an unsustainable luxury.

BTV’s financial hemorrhage is structural. Data presented to parliament reveals that the broadcaster has run persistent operating deficits for five consecutive fiscal years. In the vocabulary of corporate governance, this is not an enterprise weathering a temporary downturn, but a legacy entity whose core value proposition has collapsed. 

Costs continue their steady, bureaucratic climb while revenues remain stubbornly flatline. In ordinary times, a loss-making state enterprise might be tolerated as a necessary price for social cohesion. But these are not ordinary times. 

The National Board of Revenue missed its tax collection target by over 1 lakh crore taka in the 2025–26 fiscal year, and the national budget deficit is projected to breach 4% of GDP. When a state is borrowing heavily to keep the lights on, allocating 23 crore taka every month to subsidize a television channel that brings in just 73 lakh taka requires an exercise in profound institutional blindness.

The traditional defense of BTV rests on a historical pillar: the unique ability of its terrestrial signal to reach the furthest corners of the delta.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when the state needed to manage natural disasters, broadcast national budget speeches, or stream parliamentary debates, BTV’s fourteen relay stations—covering 90% of the country’s geography—were the only game in town. 

Today, that argument has been entirely bypassed by technology. Bangladesh has undergone a digital transformation that renders terrestrial television functionally obsolete. Recent data shows that 98.9% of Bangladeshi households now possess at least one mobile phone, and 72.4% own a smartphone. 

By the end of 2025, the country counted 82.8 million internet users, representing a 47% penetration rate. Crucially, internet penetration in rural areas has surged to 49%, while urban connectivity stands at 78%.

Breaking of monopoly 

In 2026, the primary vehicle for reaching a remote village in Kurigram or a coastal community in Cox’s Bazar is no longer a rooftop television antenna; it is a 4G-enabled smartphone screen. Maintaining a massive, state-funded broadcasting infrastructure simply to transmit official speeches is an expensive anachronism. 

Modern governments do not buy television networks to stream data; they build lean digital pipelines. The Parliamentary Secretariat or the Prime Minister’s Office could manage high-definition webcasts for a tiny fraction of BTV's annual budget. 

The United Kingdom's parliament has streamed its proceedings independently since 2008 without requiring the BBC to dedicate a broadcast channel to it. Bangladesh can easily replicate this model.

If the state still requires a presence on traditional television screens for civic announcements, it has cheaper tools at its disposal. Bangladesh currently boasts 55 licensed private television channels, of which 39 are actively broadcasting. 

These networks rely on the state for periodic license renewals and access to public spectrum, which is a finite national resource. There is no structural reason why the government cannot embed public service obligations into these licensing agreements. This is standard practice across Europe. 

In nations like the UK, France, and Germany, commercial broadcasters are legally obligated to carry a set quota of public-interest programming, news, or educational content as a condition of market access. 

Regulators in Dhaka could easily mandate that private channels dedicate 10 to 20 hours annually to critical national events, emergency disaster warnings, or civic programming.

To be sure, Bangladesh's private broadcast sector is facing its own commercial headwinds. The domestic advertising pie is too small to comfortably feed 39 distinct channels. Imposing an expansive, bureaucratic programming mandate would push several struggling stations over the edge. 

Therefore, any public service framework must be tightly calibrated, limited strictly to genuine civic utility, and completely divorced from the heavy-handed, partisan political messaging that characterized the old mandatory BTV news relays.

An obscure ‘giant’  

The decline of BTV is a cautionary tale of institutional capture. Decades ago, the network was financially self-reliant, pulling in nearly 90% of its operating costs from commercial advertising. Its financial ruin began when successive regimes transformed it from a public service broadcaster into an unvarnished state propaganda tool. 

As the editorial independence of the newsroom withered, audiences drifted toward agile, private competitors. When viewers left, commercial advertisers followed, leaving the state to pick up an ever-expanding bill for salaries, pensions, and capital expenditures. 

The public’s resentment toward this arrangement boiled over during the July uprisings of 2024, when protesters targeted and set fire to BTV’s Dhaka headquarters. It was a violent, symbolic rejection of an institution viewed not as a national asset, but as an expensive instrument of regime survival.

The interim government’s Media Reform Commission has proposed a merger of BTV, Bangladesh Betar, and the state news agency into an autonomous National Broadcasting Corporation. Committees have been tasked with ensuring managerial independence and reviewing the last 15 years of media policy.

These are noble bureaucratic exercises, but they fail to diagnose the underlying financial disease. Autonomy does not guarantee solvency. An independent BTV that still fails to attract viewers or advertisers will simply become a more politely managed, legally autonomous drain on the public purse.

Bangladesh can no longer afford to write a 254 crore taka annual check out of institutional sentimentality. A rational policy response would acknowledge that the old monolithic state-broadcaster model is dead. 

The government should dismantle BTV's sprawling entertainment and commercial apparatus, reducing its footprint to a lean, targeted public communication unit. Technical infrastructure should be shared across ministries, and essential broadcast reach should be secured via smart regulatory leverage over the private sector.

In an era of tight budgets and ubiquitous smartphones, funding a television channel that spends thirty-two times what it earns is bad economics and worse public policy. The market has moved on; the state must do the same.

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Adil Mahmood is a former journalist and a public policy observer