TV licence? What the hell?
 

Click here to see that I didn't make this up

This has to be one of those Internet pranks. How the hell could this be enforced? Does a Bobby in one of those nifty helmets come knocking on your door calling out "We hear the bloody telly now open the door"? Do they go around policing antennas and following the lead in wire until they find someone watching Masterpiece Theater? I have never heard of such a thing. Anyone from across the ocean care to share with us about this?

Hmm, kooky, but it seems real. I did a search on the BBC website and apparently there is a TV license fee in the UK.

Silly Brits.

Evidently, yeah.

Here's how they enforce it: with <a href="http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/information/tvdetectorvans.jsp">TV Detector Vans</a>.

There's a fleet of vans trawling around with devices that can tell when a TV is operating, and triangulate on its position. I can only presume that the owners of unlicensed TVs are subject to a Brazil-style SWAT team force insertion via large hole cut in their ceiling, and are carried off wrapped in industrial saran wrap.

A colour TV Licence costs £126.50 and a black and white licence costs £42.00. Per year. And that's at the GBP worth US$1.70!

So there is a group out there making sure that the government isn't getting ripped of its buck seventy a year? I'll be damned.

the fee is used mainly to pay for the BBC, in return not only brits but the world is given alot of great quality television and sites like news.bbc and the bcc classical music collection and other endevoursuch as the the bbc streaming video project

I figured the fees would be used for such... But isn't enforcement costing more than what they are losing? Labor (labour?), equipment, clerical fees, etc...

What about monitors on computers? Do they just count total CRT's & leave you alone if the qty doesn't change?

Can they detect LCD's & such? I recall a news item a couple years ago about one LCD brand emitting signals in a fairly pointless range. I suppose it could be used for GB's fee enforcement.

That's $1.70 times 126.5 for a color TV and $1.70 times 42 for a black and white. That's pretty substantial in my book. We have a TV in practically every room.

Nice way to tax people...... lol next time I complain about a tax on ciggies or soda I'll remember this one.

Nearly all of europe has such a tax (Britain, Germany and some others as well). There are some ways people try and get around it, it's pretty pointless if you ask me as there are probably some easier ways to raise the required funds. Even more rediculous is the recent measure in Britain to introduce a computer tax, the reason: those computers can be used to reach the BBC webpage. I think that Germany has a radio fee as well.
Though the practical means of enforcing these fees are rather crazy, for most people it's just some more money they pay the government.

Its 1 license/Family basically (1 "house"), so its not that bad. Basically they don't care if:

its a PC with no TV card (you aren't watching tv)
your TV is solely for games usage (such as PS2, XBox etc)
your TV is unconnected and you have a good reason (I was dead at the time mate)

Its not that bad, and normally when caught the fine is a lot less than the £1000 figure...

Yeah, we do have to pay to watch TV, but then, we don't have to pay to go to hospital :D
It is just for the BBC channels. They don't have ad breaks, so they need to get there money from somewhere. It works out about £10 a month.
I know someone who tried to use the excuse "I just don't watch the BBC channels, so I don't have to pay"!

I find it offensive that someone can have the right to transmit a signal into my body that I would not have the right to look at. Same shit here with satellite TV and radio. This is the moral and physical equivalent of levying fines on people who look at Buckingham Palace without a licence. What about a Faraday cage?

you only need one license for each residence, not one fro each television you own

France has a similar tax as well as Poland...its kinda like paying for cable....it sucks but how much do we as Americans spend on Cable and Satellite...

Its not a LOT if you average it out.. it sucks and maybe its pointless(Ive never lived overseas, just visited) but when you consider what we pay for our TV...

Strange, your avitar amuses me.

Remember, this is a STATE owned broadcast network.
And we have to suffer a LOT less 'Buy useless shit now!' commercials than offered by non-cable channels in America.

The BBC is actually something to be proud of. They come in under budget, make award winning dramas and documentaries.
Most of the product they make is not sensationalist, but highly cultural. Thank god someone is protecting that.

Almost everywhere in the world has come to trust the radio messages following the words "This is the BBC".

I'd rather a user tax like this than a swooping grab at everyone's pocketbooks. TV licensing makes sense, especially when you consider just how good the BBC really is and how few commercials you have to watch.

It's not much different than here, paying for different "flavours" of cable. And the BBC is way better most domestic offerings.

That which WillyPete and hightheif said.

I can't count the number of times that I've tuned into the BBC over the years and thought "If only the rest of our broadcasters where this good..."
If I get quality programming like that then I'm quite willing to pay a £126 TV fee, especially since that will fund not just BBC 1 & 2 but their satellite channels, all 5 radio stations and the World Service, which, imho, has very few equals when it comes to overseas news.

Channel 5 on the other hand... *aaaargh*

S: You don't need a license for your cat.
C: I bleeding well do and I got one. He can't be called Eric without it--
S: There's no such thing as a bloody cat license.
C: Yes there is!
S: Isn't!
C: Is!
S: Isn't!
C: I bleeding got one, look! What's that then?
S: This is a dog license with the word 'dog' crossed out and 'cat' written
in in crayon.
C: The man didn't have the right form.
S: What man?
C: The man from the cat detector van.
S: The looney detector van, you mean.
C: Look, it's people like you what cause unrest.
S: What cat detector van?
C: The cat detector van from the Ministry of Housinge.
S: Housinge?
C: It was spelt like that on the van (I'm very observant!). I never seen so
many bleeding aerials. The man said that their equipment could pinpoint
a purr at four hundred yards! And Eric, being such a happy cat, was a
piece of cake.

Furry,

Agreed. BBC content is good. Not always my thing but the quality is great. My scrooging over forced payment was about the thought of forced homage to U.S. stations. No thanks. The only thing we have close to the BBC is PBS, and their schedule is roughly:

40% childrens' programming (hey, I grew up with it)
20% BBC content
20% NOVA, News, Musical Performances, etc. (I want THIS channel.)
5% Antiques Roadshow
5% Advertisements for Antiques Roadshow
10% requests for contributions.

I'd pay the BBC license.

£126.50 for special programming isn't bad in and of itself. What is bad is that you are forced to pay it even if you don't want to use the programming. I think that is what people have a problem with.

If I lived in the UK, I'd have a TV just for a game console, I guess. No licensing fees there, I think.

Toaster - as far as I'm aware you'd need the licence even if you only used it for games. The licence isn't for watching TV, it's for owning any appliance that is able to receive the signals. I think you need one even for a VCR and no TV.

But I think there is a lot of scepticism about the TV vans, about whether they even do what they say. I know a lot of students who believe they are just vans with aerials glued on to scare people (if you're watching TV without a licence and you see the van cruise down your street, it 'could' be for you).

Someone might want to correct me as I'm in the UK and don't own a TV or anything that receives the signals so it's never been a concern for me.

They used to run adverts on other channels telling the nation about how detector vans and hand held gizmos were able to tell what channel was being watched in every house on the street. I think that may have been a lie though.

The more recent campaigns say that they don't need all that as they just have a list of every UK address, and compare it to a list of those that have paid their licence. I get the feeling that they may have been caught out in a lie, and had to change the story of how they track licence.

I remember a story in the press about a guy who went to court refusing to pay his licence fee and claiming that he couldn't receive the signal for BBC channels where he lived. He got off with paying when it turned out to be true.

Not so lucky was another story that I remember when a bloke was taken to court over his non payment. When asked why he hadn't paid, his answer of 'well I've had the TV for years now, and it's worked perfectly well without one,' saw him fined. God may love a tryer, judges apparently don't.

Only since the birth of Sky TV have I come to respect and admire the quality of the programing that the BBC deliver. They clearly have far tighter budgets, but somehow manage a to produce a quality that exceeds their means. Not everything that they do floats my boat as it were, but at least it's of high quality, and varied enough to reach most people in society some of the time.

It isn't so much that the Beeb budgets are tighter rather it is that they don't acquire as much as Sky One, Living or Five (all comparble to BBC one or two). The Beeb, while they do acquire also produces a large percentage of their own programming. Producing is way more expense than acquiring.

Hmm, Sky.

The only thing I watch on that is the movie channels and Sky One for the SF.

I like TV without adverts, so i'm more than happy to pay for a TV licence.

Beeb's gota get money somehow.

Well, fuck.

I would glady pay for tv with no commercials.

Absolutely. But I wouldn't care for being charged to support a broadcast network that I may or may not watch. Were someone to own a TV and DVD player with no interest in anything than watching Monty Python disks or porn I could see them balking at purchasing a license.

Soooooo...just for having a tv, you have to pay, regardless of whether you watch the state propaganda channel or not.

That's where I run into a problem.

See my sig...

Check your governments budget.

Check to see what they spend on health care.

Ask yourself 'where does that money come from?'

Please... tell that that to Tony Blair.

If you think the BBC is state sponsored propaganda then you must think Fox News is truly fair and balanced...

Singapore has a similar thing since it used to be a British colony. Even license for radios as well.

We didn't pay for it as we were expatriates living in a high rise apartment. Each time the officer came to check the premises we scurried the small little TV away (hard to find a 13" in a 3,000 sq. foot residence.)

One day the new house keeper opened the door and let them right in, so from that point onwards we had to pay for the TV.

Just an FYI: do you guys read all the taxes that are imposed on the cable bills you guys get? That's the same thing, it's just not as upfront in time, nor is it called a TV tax, but damned if you call up your cable company and request that you don't want to pay it.

In Norway we have a TV licence, and I gladly pay it because it gives me 12 radiostations and a couple of tv-stations WITHOUT COMMERCIALS and they run good shows too.

Additionally, if you buy a TV in certain high street shops, they will inform the TV Licencing Authority of your new purchase on your behalf, so that they know to have a look at their records and start sending you letters.

I also read about a couple of situations where people who had no TVs at all were getting at least one letter every month, couched in intimidating 'you are in deep shit' type language, and threatening this that and the other. The only way they could get the letters to stop - and then only temporarily - is if they allowed an 'enforcement officer' into their home to check that they weren't using a TV. I believe that the Licencing Authority now sub-contracts this part of their operation to a security agency.

There's a lot of good things to say about the BBC, but there's a lot of bad things too. For every wonderful and marvellous drama or documentary, there's about 30,000 episodes of eastenders. There's all those many many antique-selling programmes, and don't forget the 'Changing Rooms' explosion of a couple of years back. Oh, and Fame Academy, Strictly Night Fever, Celebrity Fame Academy. Oh and what about this one... Bring Your Husband To Heel - the show that teaches women how to use dog-training techniques on their men.

People are always harping on about the quality of the BBC, sometimes I have to ask myself why?

In the end, I suppose It's not necessarily a bad system, but the way its enforced is just harsh. I guess if people weren't always trying to evade it...

We have TV licenses in Sweden too. The way they make people pay them are thus:
1) Making the basic assumption that every adult has a TV.
2) Sending out letters every once in a while to the adults that don't pay a TV license. If, like me, you still live with mom you just send a form back stating you live in a household that pays the license and give that license number. If you live on your own and don't have a TV or don't want to pay you either ignore the letter or send the form back stating you don't own a TV. Then you can expect a visit from the men in brown jackets.
They used the detector van mythos here too, but nobody falls for that any more. Swedish public TV isn't nearly as good as the BBC though.

We have another more annoying tax, namely the tape tax. It's a tax placed on every blank casette tape, video tape and CD sold that then supposedly goes to music artists. The idea is that they lose money because people copy records instead of bying them... agh, it's just stupid and annoying. Although I suppose I should be grateful they don't tax copier paper in the same manner. Yet.

Chill, it was only hyperbole.

Yeah, but you aren't forced to buy cable TV. Basic channels are free.

I bet those have adverts though.

All channels in the US have adverts, regardless of whether you pay for them or not.

Except maybe a few channels like C-SPAN or something.

Exunctly.

BBC doesn't have adverts. An hour of programming is actually an hour, not 45 minutes.

It also used to be a state controlled enterprise anyway, so the laws arn't gona be changing anytime soon.

PBS is the US's equivalent of the BBC. They have to run pledge drives to suppliment the little bit that they get from the government.

C-SPAN is a cable thing. All the cable operators pitch in for C-SPAN for some of their public service type things.

I also just realized that I'm replying to an older message in the thread. I hope I don't look like a dumbass for reposting what other people have already said.

http://upe.acm.jhu.edu/websites/Jon_Grover/page2.htm
SFW link
It works, I'm in the process of building a setup to do it, and I think WIRED had an article about driving around NYC with one, with highlights being Wall Street (insider tips, anyone?) and the World Trade Center (I think it was 1999)

So, have the costs gone down? The website you linked says that the boxes cost around $5000.

What you are doing is paying a tax for a device that can receive television signals.
The govt here controls who broadcasts on what frequencies, just like your state authorities. And for that you pay the tax if you use their service.

Just like road and vehicle taxes or airport taxes.

If you have a monitor that does not have a built-in tuner then you can get away with it as you can obviously only play pre-recorded programs. This fails if you have an external tuner sitting next to it.

So technically yes, if you had a tuner card in your pc you might be able to bluff out of it, but the Sky digital dish or the aerial cable entering your house would be a dead give-away.

I'm confused by the premise of this answer. I know that you pay taxes to watch TV.... I also know, I think, that you have adverts on your TV as well.

I don't know what the premise for your answer is. Is it because of the van Eck boxes?

What? Not exactly.

You HAVE to pay a fee to watch television. I don't HAVE to pay any fee for television.

Sure, if I want more channels I have to pay a fee, but I'm not forced to pay the fee. And yes, I will have to see adverts. But I will have to see adverts on cable television also, so the point is moot.

Basic cable is not free.

Broadcast aerial is.

I can tell you that almost in NYC has access to broadcast TV for free as most apartments buildings will not allow one to put an antennae on the rooftop without some form of payment to the building owner. I believe ours was $1/month.

If you ask almost anyone, it's quite rare to hear someone say that they don't have cable TV, unlike in the 80's when cable penetration was low and cable infrastructure still being built.

I also know that in Iceland each household has to pay for the government channel, I don't recall the fee.

I'm also pretty sure there are some taxes built into the cost of the TV set you purchase not just the sales tax.

Very soon even broadcast TV reception will require a digital converter for non-digital televisions. Televisions without won't be picking up anything but high quality snowstorms. The existing TV spectrum will be auctioned and re-allocated. Those digital converters shouldn't cost much initially - which will help calm the masses - but I wonder how long before pay-per-view for "enhanced content".

Indications (from hearings minutes, press releases, interviews) suggest broadcasters are pushing hard for a rapid all-digital adoption. The FCC wanted it for 2006. McCain had proposed that the current (?) deadline for digital-only TV sales be extended from 2007 to 2009, and that a chunk of the spectrum auction proceeds go toward providing converters (public frequencies, etc.), but the Senate killed it. It probably will be extended due to lack of consensus between cable, broadcasters, and govt, but I haven't heard about many public hearings. (Memories of the FCC lifting media ownership restrictions back in 2003.)

I haven't been keeping up on things this last year so don't take dates or details as gospel. Regardless, the direction seems clear. Our free television won't remain what we grew up with.

Right back at you... babe. ;)

La di di, one two three,
Eric the Half a Bee.
A B C D E F G,
Eric the Half a Bee.

Is this wretched demi-bee,
Half asleep upon my knee,
Some freak from a menagerie?
No! It's Eric the Half a Bee.

Fiddle di dum, fiddle di dee,
Eric the Half a Bee.
Ho ho ho, tee hee hee,
Eric the Half a Bee.

Half-a-bee, philosophically
Must ipso-facto half not-be.
But half the bee, has got to bee
Vis-a-vis its entity ... d'you see?
But can a bee be said to be
Or not to be an entire bee
When half the bee is not a bee
Due to some ancient injury?

Singing...

La di di, a-one-two-three
Eric The Half-A-Bee
A-B-C-D-E-F-G
Eric The Half-A-Bee
Is this a-wretched demi-bee
Half asleep upon my knee
Some freak from a managerie?
NO! It's Eric The Half-A-Bee!
A-fiddle-di-dum, a-fiddle-di-dee
Eric The Half-A-Bee
Ho-ho-ho, tee-hee-hee
Eric The Half-A-Bee
I love this hive employ-e-e
Bisected accidentally
One summer afternoon by me
I love him carnally
He loves him carnally
Semi-carnally. The end.


:D

I'm going to go download that song now...

You can download songs?????

what will they think of next!

Yeah, I know. Isn't that what I said in my post?

Genetically engineered radio-active super songs, that spout fire from their lyrics and crush all who dare not buy them!

Well, if certain american companies get their way they will. :hmm:

One of my favourate bonuses of the TV license is that all of the non-BBC channels in the UK still have to compete with the BBC. This means that none of them can bombard you with ads every 5 minutes, and you can get through most shows with only one ad break. Broadcasters who try to show more ads risk losing viewers to the BBC.

I think the license is worth it. The BBC's trialing a service that'll let UK residents download its shows from the internet and watch them for a week after they are broadcast on TV, which should be nice, seeing as we're the ones who paid to have them made in the first place!

nope you said basic channels, which can be served up via cable as well. Cable has a basic tier which has the broadcast channels and a few cable channels.

Broadcast channels in some markets the big 3/5 depeding. CBS/NBC/ABC/FOX/UPN are free via over the air (OTA).

I believe the proper response to that claim (made by the site, not you,) is, "pfft." Like I said, I'm building one, and I don't intend to spend more than $50, most of which will be on the antenna.

I was going to make this point. However, the organisation which licenses the broadcasters imposes a limit on the proportion of time given up to adverts. Channel 4 was recently told to cut the number of ads during 'Lost'. Still, the fact that we have a broadcaster that can produce quality output without having to appeal to the lowest common denominator means the other broadcasters have to up their standards as well.

To clear up a misunderstanding that some have made, the license is not for owning a TV tuner, it's for receiving TV signals. You can have a TV for your games console without needing a license.

To those who resent HAVING to pay for TV: what is the markup on a can of Coke over a can of generic cola? And where do you think some of that goes? So when you go to a shop that doesn't have a generic version, or if you live in one of a growing number of towns that consist almost entirely of nationally advertised chain stores then you're paying for TV that you might have no intention of watching.

Most TV can receive aerial signals without an external/roof-top antennae. You can actually get REALLY good inside-the-house antennae these days. *shrug*

Not in an apartment building or most densly populated areas like New York City.

It may be good enough for you to see most of the picture with some snow and fuzz. I on the otherhand cannot stand to see any screen issues since the wife looked for transmission and tape damage as part of her job, so she balks and any kind of bad images.