Ways in which making media is funded.

"There's no such thing as a free meal," or in this case there's no such thing as free media.....
Nothing is cheap nowadays and with the high quality we expect from our media enterprises, nothing can afford to be..... When it comes to Final Cut Pro and Avid (currently the most widely used programme in the industy for film and video editing) no expense can be spared as programmes such as these aren't cheap! With Final Cut Pro currently available for £199.99 on the Mac App Store.

With this information in mind, only one real question comes to mind.... "Who's paying for it all"

• With a budget of $258 million, Spider-Man 3 (2007) cost more to produce than any movie before or after its release.

• Cleopatra (1963) was produced at a total cost of $44 million, which is over $295 million in today’s currency. With its original budget being a mere $2 million, it nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox.

• The Soviet-produced film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” was produced in 1968 for over $100 million. The film was featured in the “Guinness Book of World Records” for the Battle of Borodino scene which, with its 120,000 soldiers, makes it one of the largest battles ever filmed at an estimated adjusted cost of over $500 million.

So yet again.... Where do the media get all their money for making big productions such as these? The answer is simple, funding.... And how companies get funded is what we'll be looking at below.

Let's start off by looking at a public service broadcasting statutory corporation, known worldwide only as the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).

So how are the BBC funded? Well for the more visual out there, here's a pie chart!

On 31 March 2012 the BBC Media Action received £29.5 million in funds, who was the main funding source? Grants receivable from international bilateral donors and the money they put forward enabled the BBC to work on 67 projects at the time.

This summary financial information was extracted from the Annual Report for the year to 31 March 2012, which has been independently audited by KPMG LLP (one of the largest professional services companies in the world and one of the Big Four auditors, along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers.)

In 2011/12 the biggest donor was the British Government's Department for International Development (DFID) that directly supported a number of projects around the world.

In addition to the previous paragraph, as well as projects where BBC Media Action was a junior partner on a project led by another organisation. Skip to November 2011 and the BBC was successful in agreeing a Global Grant with DFID that significantly increased their level of funding over a five year period, whilst wrapping all existing direct grants into one overall agreement.

Other major governmental funders are both the European and the Union British Government's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In addition to this many other government aid agencies also fund pieces of work. An example of this was when the Norwegian Government provided an important core grant for the BBC in 2011/12.

The BBC also receive project grants from a number of UN organisations and these are consolidated in the annual report. As well as this they also receive project funding from a number of charitable foundations. The most significant is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that funded the BBC's work in India in 2011/12.

The BBC do not receive funding from their own licence fee. However, they are grateful that the BBC provides BBC Media Action with office space and a small grant from the World Service.

Taken directly from BBC's website, they claim

"As a charity, we raise funds from individuals and companies and receive some services pro bono from companies. Though this represents a comparatively small income stream it is critically important to the organisation because it is flexible. This means the funding can be used as a catalyst for projects that then inspire something much larger."