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Comment by soneil | Hacker News Reader

I don't begrudge the TV licence too much. I used to, and then I moved to Ireland - where I pay a roughly equivalent amount for a roughly equivalent licence, which funds RTÉ (and tg4? unclear) with nowhere near the same results. And still ads.

It turns out the better half of Europe has TV licences in one form or another - but for some reason, we never hear about them. When the UK has to fund a state broadcaster, it's dystopian. When everyone else does it, it's business as usual.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence )

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The rest of Europe has always looked at the BBC as a model (if not THE model) of public-service broadcasting. I honestly don't understand why it's so controversial inside Britain - or rather I do, and it's not a pretty sight (the criticism comes from people with other interests in manipulating public discourse through the media, like a certain infamous Australian and his tabloid pals).

The real cancer of UK society is the tabloid press, now mutating into socialmedia-powered viral linkfarms. The BBC is absolutely fine.

What's dystopian is not the tv license, is their style of public communication. In general public communication in the UK feels sometimes very direct and almost threatening. The sense of authority and hierarchy implied is palpable. Not for nothing the UK is source of some wonderful parodies on the theme: for example the Scarfolk series:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/digging-through-the-ar...

Or one of my favourite Monthy Python sketches:

"How not to be seen": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGv8oAHxekU

Or the anti-piracy ad from the IT crowd:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPEeaxI0OPU

The enforcement actions and publicizing of the license in the UK seem to be the most dystopian, in Ireland it's a bit over the top as well

But you're right, it is present in multiple countries, I think Germany and France just turned it into a household fee

In Italy it has been merged into electricity bills. I kid you not. And of course, the state broadcaster (RAI) is still chock-full of ads on all its channels. This is because it's not a media organisation as much as a cash-machine for aides and cronies of the government du-jour, with each channel literally allocated informally to each major party. You can imagine the average production quality.

Same for RTS in Serbia, worse even because not only do we HAVE to pay the TV license via power bill, or get sued and have power cut off (I kid you not, because of the TV license fee!) (happened to me), RTS also has 8 commercial channels that are funded from the public's money, which are only available on select cable networks.

It's RTS 1, RTS 2, RTS 3, RTS HD (which is redundant since the 3 channels are already in Full HD), and then RTS 24/7, RTS Drama, RTS Archive, RTS Music, RTS Life, RTS Kids, RTS Music 2, RTS VOD and RTS SVOD, RTS [something I can't translate] (all names are translated from Serbian).

The TV service is the only one with HD terrestrial broadcasting, and yet it's production quality is absolute garbage (I mean literally, the video quality is absolutely terrible, I'm not even talking about the topics they deal with).

Basically, a money sink and waste of time. People who have SBB (United Group) watch N1 (CNN affiliate) in Full HD (with 30 Mbps bitrate, compared to 4 Mbps for RTS 1 HD).

People who don't have SBB cable, are stuck with the low level garbage channels from our state broadcaster.

Turkey does the electricity bill thing too.

"enforcement" consists of them sending you nasty letters, then after after 6 months knocking on the door and asking "sir do you own a television set"

to which my response was "sod off", and they did

repeat again every 5 years

It does get escalated sometimes https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/24/in-court-non...

the only way of that happening is if they happen to observe you being naughty (i.e. live TV through the window when they call), or you admit to being naughty when they ask their questions

as someone who hasn't watched broadcast TV in years (or iplayer): I'm not worried

Ah yes I wouldn't worry if I didn't have a TV.

I think there’s talk of moving to a household fee here too. Oddly, making it universal seems to be more acceptable than a consumption tax. On one hand, I can see the plus sides - there’s a lot more ways to consume national broadcasters now, and it seems strange that I should pay to receive the national broadcaster on my TV, but if I scrapped the TV and watched it on my laptop, I wouldn’t (I know the UK complicates that further than we do).

On the hand, it feels unintuitive that there’s now no way to opt out. But I’m not sure how we delineate universal taxes (eg, my taxes pay for schools but I don’t use them) vs consumption taxes (I don’t pay road tax because I don’t drive). We still ultimately need to pay for them somehow - I don’t drive, but I still depend on roads.

IIRC (and this was dear to my heart in the UK as a non-motor-vehicle-driving taxpayer), road tax isn't a thing. There's vehicle excise duty, but that's not earmarked for roads (since 1937, according to https://ipayroadtax.com/no-such-thing-as-road-tax/bring-back...).

Also: "The maintenance and improvement of these roads are funded through local council taxes, fees, and central government grants." - https://www.loc.gov/law/help/infrastructure-funding/englanda...

So rest assured that if you pay tax in the UK, you pay for roads along with other infrastructure and services.

And now for something completely different... I recall being told, by a man who knocked on my door in a college residence, that the van had detected my television. I had no television set. He asked to come in and look. I declined and he went away. Either enforcement by deception, or a creep using a pretext to get into womens' college rooms. Either way, bad!

I do miss the BBC website without ads and BBC iPlayer though. We had a television in later years (and a license).

>> It turns out the better half of Europe has TV licences in one form or another - but for some reason, we never hear about them.

It's probably because in the rest of Europe national broadcasters don't badger you to pay a license even if you don't actually own a TV set.

In the UK, I get threatening red-lettered envelopes every few years- because it's easier to harass me by mail than to try and figure out whether I watch TV or not.

And the threat is quite real. The broadcaster can send people to your house to snoop around, to see if you have a TV set or not. These agents are known to take liberties with the extend of their power (they will allege that they can enter your property whether you agree to let them in, or not) and there is basically nothing stopping them from stating that you are watching a TV programme as it is being broadcast if you have have equipment capable of doing so, such as a computer, or just a smartphone.

Basically, the TV licensing people in the UK are convinced that, if you say that you do not watch TV you are lying, and they treat you as an offender by default.

Does any of this happen in any other European country?

In my country (Italy) we kept receiving threatening letters as well as random phone calls, sometimes even attempted inspections although unless they came with the police and a warrant you simply wouldn't let them in. Some context: the original law declared the tax was due for state owned TV reception, so when in the late 70s to 80s private owned TV stations boomed, some people modified their TV sets so that the state TV could not be received. Problem solved? Nope! the government promptly modified the tax into a more general tax. The text is so vague that it could be applied to cellphones and computers too, although they always told that's not the case, but the vague text remains. Anyways, letters, phonecalls and random visits went on for decades, then a few years back a genius politician solved the problem by integrating the TV tax within the electricity bill. If you don't own a TV set (and know your rights) you can still declare that and get the amount cut from the bill, but that will ensure an inspection will follow.

Thanks. In Greece also (where I'm originally from) the TV tax is rolled in to the electricity bill and you can opt out. I haven't heard of any inspections but that's because nothing works in the Greek public sector. Or anywhere in the whole country.

Are you arguing that because other countries do the same observing the UK has a totalitarian approach to TV licensing is a non-issue?

Also, my point was the advertising specifically, and attitude generally was dystopic, a la 1984. I am unaware of any other countries injecting that kind of narrative into their culture.

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