YLE

Yleisradio Oy (Finnish), also known as Rundradion (Swedish) or the Finnish Broadcasting Company (English), abbreviated to Yle (pronounced /yle/; previously stylised as YLE before March 2012 corporate rebrand), is Finland's national public-broadcasting company, founded in 1926. It is a public limited company which is 99.98% owned by the Finnish state, and employs around 3,200 people in Finland. Yle shares many of its organizational characteristics with its UK counterpart, the BBC, on which it was largely modelled.

For the greater part of Yle's existence the company was funded by the revenues obtained from a broadcast receiving licence fee payable by the owners of radio sets (1927–1976) and television sets (1958–2012), as well as receiving a portion of the broadcasting licence fees payable by private television broadcasters. Since the beginning of 2013 the licence fee has been replaced by a public broadcasting tax (known as the "Yle tax"), which is collected annually from private individuals together with their other taxes, and also from corporations.

By far the major part of the Yle tax is collected from individual taxpayers, with payments being assessed on a sliding scale. Minors, as well as persons with an annual income of less than €7,813 are exempt. At the lower limit the tax payable by individuals amounts to €50 per annum and the maximum (payable by an individual with a yearly income of €20,588 or more) is set at €140. The rationale for the abolition of the previous television licence fee was the development of other means of delivering Yle's services, such as the Internet, and the consequent impracticality of continuing to tie the fee to the ownership of a specific device. Yle receives no advertising revenues as all channels are advertisement-free.

Yle has a status that could be described as that of a non-departmental public body. It is governed by a parliamentary governing council. Yle's turnover in 2010 was €398.4 million.

Yle operates four national television channels, 13 radio channels and services, and 25 regional radio stations. Finland being an officially bilingual country — around 5.5% of the population have Swedish as their mother-tongue — Yle provides radio and TV programming in Swedish through a department called Svenska Yle. As is customary in Finnish television and cinemas, foreign films and shows are generally subtitled on Yle's channels. Dubbing is used in cartoons intended for young children who have not yet learned to read, as well as many nature and history documentaries ("to avoid spoiling beautiful pictures").

In the field of international broadcasting, one of Yle's best known services is Nuntii Latini, the news in Latin, which is broadcast worldwide and made available over the Internet. Yle was also one of 23 founding broadcasting organisations of the European Broadcasting Union in 1950. Yle hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 2007 in Helsinki, Finland.