While reading I thought, "for sure we will get to the part of the article where the British realized their folly and discontinued the licensing." But that part never came. Brits: is this for real, does this still exist? Do you pay a license to use your TV? Is it only for OTA programming or using the device in general?
We pay the licence fee to fund the BBC. They make some amazing documentaries (Planet Earth, Blue Planet etc). They also have radio stations, all advert free. Being advert free is rare these days.
That's fine, a well funded public broadcaster is a great idea. The question is why in the world is it done as a license fee instead of as a much simpler to implement tax or a subscription where the OTA broadcasts are encrypted and a fee is paid to maintain the ability to decrypt.
A similar system in Germany (where we are constantly amazed at how much better content the BBC produces) is not a tax to minimize government influence. The goal is to make it public, but not government controlled.
Personally I think that it should be organized like a tax nonetheless, because if a public broadcaster is a benefit to society, it's a benefit to those who watch just as much as to those who don't watch, similar to how those who don't enter medical school will still enjoy the availability of doctors. A precedence exists, in Germany the Finanzamt is happily collecting a tax-like thing on behalf of the established churches from their members, without that ever having led anyone to suggest that the churches were controlled by the government. The investure controversy isn't exactly still lingering.
It's political. There's no parliamentary support for a general tax, but no public support for getting rid of the BBC. The Tories in particular hate the Beeb, but the public love it (contrary to the rather negative comments here).
So the tax lives on in this archaic form instead and every now and then when the Tories are in power they try and defund or threaten the BBC somehow. Usually within a year of getting elected, and then there's a backlash and they have to back down.
The latest wheeze was to force the BBC to get pensioners to pay, and they managed to pull it off by getting the public to blame the BBC instead of the government.
Channel 4 has never been funded by taxes as far as I'm aware. That wikipedia page states it was paid for by the ITV companies paying for the right to put adverts on it, and now funds itself from it's own advert sales.
Channel 4 is a bit of an odd one, as it's publically owned but not publically funded.
The current system was started after WWII (I think), so keep that in mind. If they were rolling it out today, it probably would be implemented differently.
The radio stations are free from commercial adverts but they're bound by the same logistical problems as other radio stations, meaning a decent proportion of airtime is listening to the same adverts for other BBC radio shows over and over.
Yes, it still exists. A TV Licence is required to watch any television programme live as it is broadcast. This applies to online live streams of TV channels, even if viewed on a PC or mobile phone.
It is legal to use a TV set without a licence, so long as you do not watch any TV programmes live. So it's fine to connect it to a laptop and use it as a monitor, or listen to radio programmes through it, for example.
You need a licence if you watch live TV as it's broadcast, or if you watch BBC iPlayer catchup content.
You need a licence for any device that you watch live tv as it's broadcast. You need a licence to watch live tv, no matter where it's broadcast from.
The wording of the law says "installed or used to receive", so in theory you need a licence if you have eg a tv plugged into an aerial. They don't prosecute those cases any more.
You don't need a licence if you're not watching live tv. So you can watch all the ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5 catchup as much as you like. Or netflix, amazon, HBO, etc services.
People pay for it because the BBC is generally pretty good. It's stuck in a weird political landscape where some MPs want the BBC to be independent and not be funded by a licence fee, but those same MPs refuse to allow the BBC to operate commercially.
A longer term plan for the BBC would be welcome, and that's probably going to be a subscription service at some point.
The was quite a while where iPlayer was covered by their law, there was another loophole where if your watching it on an untethered device (on a battery with wifi) that wasn't covered either, but I'm not sure now...
The whole law is antiquated, now you don't need them or their transmission equipment. I do believe that if they move to a subscription model they will lose many customers, especially those with Netflix etc (I don't even know if the aerial cable in my flat works or even own a tv, I use a 43" monitor if I do want to watch anything).
The rules recently changed and people now need a licence to watch content on BBC iPlayer.
If you own a licence and you're away from home you're allowed to use a device powered only by internal batteries to watch TV -- this is covered by your home licence.
Yes, this leads to ridiculous situations. You watch live tv on your phone? Fine, until you plug in your phone to charge and you're now breaking the law. I don't think anyone has been prosecuted for this type of use.
"Installed" usually meant "aerial plugged in and stations tuned in".
Plug in and tune only the radio stations - that doesn't require a licence (radio isn't TV even when carried on a TV network, the TV effectively becomes a DAB radio).
In Switzerland, you have to pay the tax if you could possibly watch TV at home, so just having a TV or even no TV and an internet connection makes the tax mandatory, even if you don’t French/German/or Italian.
The inspector got me at my apartment once and was certain that I needed to pay the tax. I invited him into my apartment and he saw I had no TV, radio, or Internet, and left very disappointed.
It does, and it's every bit as ridiculous as it sounds, but I suspect it'll be discontinued within the next decade or so and the BBC will become something sane like a normal subscription channel.
Anecdotally I've noticed a sea change in general-topic UK discussion fora over the past five years or so. It used to be the case that anyone criticizing the BBC was downvoted to oblivion, but the old reverence for it as an institution is very much a minority view now.
EDIT: it's not just us, by the way; the US is actually in a small minority of countries who've never had a TV tax.
I'm not sure I'd agree that there's been some "backlash" - on any discussion, both sides will quite happily criticize the BBC for bias, which I take to be a good thing.
The funding model behind the BBC is a bit suspect - I'd prefer a direct grant from the government.
Alternatives are not particularly palatable - it becomes a department of the government, or has to self fund and becomes just another commercial provider of dross.
I think they were shortening your words "It used to be the case that anyone criticizing the BBC was downvoted to oblivion" to "backlash".
Also I haven't heard about the BBC becoming less popular, do you have any evidence for this? As far as I recall, BBC 1 is still the nation's favourite channel.
It would be interesting to know how you voted in the EU referendum, as I tend to find this sort of anti-BBC-ness the greatest amongst Leave voters for no apparent logical reason.
No, that sentence was about a strong pro-BBC sentiment; goldcd's "backlash" is about a hypothetical anti-BBC one.
I stopped owning a TV way back in 2004, specifically out of disgust at the BBC piling in to the property bubble insanity along with everyone else. If that's what "noncommercial" buys you, I don't really see the point.
And I think the drift is less about the popularity of BBC TV channels versus non-BBC TV channels, than about the move to streaming and other Internet versus TV in general.
reply