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Comment by cooper_ganglia | Hacker News Reader

A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK.

Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.

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The BBC is prized in the UK, and rightly so. Most national broadcasters have strong public interest provisions but the Beeb has a history and culture of strong independent journalism, incredible childrens and family output and acts as a mainstay anchor to support a creative industry.

There is plenty to criticise but the weird ring fenced tax that we pay is incredible value for money (films, tv, web, journalism for the price of Netflix

This a thousand times over. And don’t forget the 8 entirely advert-free radio stations featuring music, live sport and current affairs too.

That's probably an argument in favour of having it a fee instead of buried in taxes, so people raise hell if they suggest adverts.

Meanwhile the Canadian CBC is buried in taxes and has as many ads as any other station.

How much taxpayer money is wasted on the accounting, the enforcement, and the scary-sounding letters? Wouldn’t it be better if the government just gave taxpayer money to the BBC directly?

You mean "how much money is given to people to do those things"? Because the money doesn't magically disappear in the pockets of "big beeb", all those tasks are performed by people who get paid for that, drawing an income and then spending the money they earned by economically participating in society.

There is no money being wasted. Although it might certainly be a case of paper being wasted.

The UK government/BBC is happy to give £91m/year to Crapita to administer the TV License [0], and there are a bunch of other contractors [1]. Almost 100 million pounds wasted that could be spent on programming, but instead go to private businesses. Instead, the UK government could just directly fund the BBC out of taxes. Even if it might require a small increase of the tax rate, they could save on the enforcement and tracking.

[0] https://www.capita.com/news/capita-announces-five-year-exten...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...

> Almost 100 million pounds wasted that could be spent on programming

That's kinda assuming that everybody would continue to pay the license fee if the enforcement was stopped.

I have no clue how much revenue the TV licenses generate, or whether 100 million for administration and enforcement is a reasonable number. It feels unlikely to me?

Google google google:

  In 2021, there were 24.8 million households in England
  The TV licence fee is currently £159 a year

So there'd be 4,000 million or so in revenue if every household paid for the license (more including the rest of the UK). I _guess_ maybe 2.5% isn't a unreasoable number for administration and enforcementment? It's better that, say, Apple taking 30%...

They're saying it would be cheaper to just have the government, which already has a whole apparatus for calculating, collecting, and enforcing tax, fund the BBC directly. So there would be no TV license.

removing red tape is for business, not consumers!

My jurisdiction finally got rid of annual/biannual car registration fees and stickers. Was a rather pointless process other than collecting money.

Was hoping they'd raise gas taxes by 0.1cents/litre or something, but I guess they buried it in with other taxes.

Unfortunately, we still require driver's license renewals every 5 years for CAD$90. And they don't bother taking a picture with every renewal because that was too much bureaucracy for them. I think it's only once I'm 80 they'll haul me in for a cognitive test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

All the money being spent on enforcement is being wasted, if the alternative is just to raise general taxes by the same amount and fund it from that.

So yes, of course there is absolutely money being wasted in this comparison.

Perhaps we should also have a mandatory fee paid to the thumb twiddling association? They too will be happy to be employed after all.

I appreciate state TV content and watch it regularly. But this argument just doesn't hold water. The service is so wonderful that they had to make it a criminal offence not to be a subscriber? And surely an "independent" TV station would have to be one which is not completely controlled by the state.

The bbc has been in a state of cost cutting as the Tory government of past 15 years has consistently throttled the licence fee as “punishment” for not being state controlled enough (ie Tory’s feel the BBC is biased against them

This is unlikely - partly any news media is biased against government as they do the actual decisions, but mostly the BBC is middle class britain incarnate, whereas the tories represent - well whatever the right wing is becoming these days.

As for licence fee - it’s basically a historical accident that became a ring fenced tax. Governments have strong views about people not paying taxes.

It's only an offense if you watch live TV [1]. They could have just lumped it in with your taxes, like they do in many other countries with state TV, but this approach in theory lets you opt out, even if they like to check up on you all too regularly. I suppose one downside of the BBC approach is tax is usually proportional to your income, while the TV license fee is not, and in fact you need to pay it even if you have no income. We had great games of hiding our TV in the closet as students whenever the license people came down the street.

[1] https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/t...

> hiding our TV in the closet as students whenever the license people came down the street

There are people going door-to-door to check TV licenses? Are they cops, what kind of power do they have? Seems extremely annoying and dystopian.

They have zero power, it's just a man with a clipboard asking to have a look around your house, the correct response is to shut the door in their face.

They rely on a uniform and vague threatening language to trick people into thinking they have any authority.

Not a UK citizen, but from previous discussions on the topic:

> There are people going door-to-door to check TV licenses?

yes

> Are they cops?

> what kind of power do they have?

none. I mean write you a fine if you admit to illegally watching TV I guess. But as far as I've been told you can have the TV on and visible to the guy and go "nah that's an aquarium" and be fine.

What happened to the vans with antennae that scanned for operating TVs (there’s an IF oscillator in there I guess) to find unlicensed receivers?

The BBC has never offered any proof or explanation of how they worked, and there is some suspicion that they are fakes used for their psychological effect.

You can absolutely listen for the TV heterodyne leakage.

It’s not a criminal offense not to be a subscriber… it’s a criminal offense to pirate their content without being a subscriber.

Pretty much the same as using Cable TV or Satellite TV without paying for a subscription. I don't see much difference between paying the BBC and paying Comcast.

In the case of Satellite TV, in the 1990s there were companies that sold decoder boxes so you could use a dish antenna without paying the Satellite TV company. You'd pay the pirating company instead. Lots of cat-and-mouse games involving changing encryption methods.

fwiw I think the BBC has become way too captured by culturally dysgenic rich kids (who else can afford to work for almost nothing in London) and is terrified of being seen as elitist (so won't really educate)

It would be easy to say they don't make anything like Kenneth Clarke programs anymore but even late Blair era documentaries seem to be fading away. Nature stuff is still good though but that's just cinematography.

This will probably kill it.

I used to think this, but it's no longer true. BBC radio is pretty good value. CBBC is valuable in having an ad-free service for children. But the rest of terrestrial BBC is .. tired. It's not really changed since the advent of streaming services and youtube, which have eaten its audience from younger ages.

And BBC politics is awful. Question Time is full of planted audience members. BBC journos give softball interviews to their friends in the Conservative party.

Personally I'd split the BBC into National Archive (all the material before 2000) and BBC Ongoing, and make the latter into a normal private company which sells streaming subscriptions. And abolish the absurdity of the TV license and its often oppressive enforcement against the very poor.

Unfortunately this is no longer true. The quality of the journalism is in serious doubt. One such example: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-myth-of-the-stolen-c...

In addition many articles focus on individuals which offer a skewed perspective. I stopped using the bbc news app after noticing I was only occasionally enjoying the long reads, and even then I don’t want woke politics snuck in

It’s not just a U.K. thing. Many European countries have something similar, although it might be called something else.

It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#

Yes, but the UK is the only country with a license ridiculous enough to offer you a 50% discount _if you're blind_.

It sounds weirder than that to me:

> colour TV: £169.50 per year; monochrome TV: £57.00 per year; blind people: 50% discount

People who can't see their color TV at all pay more than people who can but have an old black-and-white one?

Do the discounts stack? If you’re blind should you just buy a monochrome tv and pay £28?

On the other hand you might end up paying quite a bit more for a monochrome tv than for the cheapest color tv you can find.

Maybe you can just turn down the color setting to 0, and break off the knob.

Weirder still, the discounts stack! So blind people can benefit from buying a black-and-white TV for an additional discount.

I've given this a lot of thought in the past. The best I could come up with is that "legally blind" could still allow for someone with _very poor_ (colour) vision...

this is making me want to buy a black and white TV (or grab a monitor and set it to always show in black and white) just so I can buy the monochrome TV license for giggles

People who can’t see their colour TV pay more than people who can’t see their B&W TV.

Oh to be a a fly on the wall when the inspector has to explain the difference to a blind person.

I think it made a lot more sense in the past. The license is set up so it’s a consumption based tax rather than taxing everyone. So only people with TVs paid TV tax. If colour increased the costs, only people consuming colour paid those increases. I imagine it made much more sense before consumption was ubiquitous

A novelty product opportunity: plug together a Raspberry Pi, an USB TV tuner and a BW LCD display to pay a smaller TV licence.

When I lived in Britain in 1989-1992, at the time the rule was that battery-powered TVs were exempt from the license fees. I had a tiny TV that could be powered by 6 AA batteries. The screen size was approximately 3 inches / 7.5cm.

I don't know if the rules have changed since then, but if they are the same, then a battery-powered laptop would also be exempt (even in color.)

That's... not what https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence says at all.

If you're blind, you almost certainly qualify for a free license.

No, it really does say this. There is expressly no free TV licence for being blind, instead a 50% discount.

https://www.gov.uk/free-discount-tv-licence

https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/for-your...

Since the switch to digital, presumably there’s no longer and signal for B&W TVs.

There has rarely (if ever) been a separate broadcast signal for B&W vs colour. Broadcasts began in B&W, over time upgraded to colour, but there wasn't a need to broadcast Channel <whatever> in B&W and broadcast the same channel in colour on a different frequency.

One single broadcast signal, and different capabilities of receivers.

But surely B&W TVs only exist with analog tuners?

Oh, I misunderstood the point you were making.

I guess you _could_ have a modern digital receiver with SCART-out (if such a thing exists) to a B&W TV. This BBC article (2018) claims 7,000 people watching TV with a B&W licence – whether they were actually watching it in B&W is not known :-D

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46125741

That makes sense, a blind man only uses half of the signal.

Although, yes, this sounds absurd, it's worth noting that the TV licence pays for the BBC and the BBC has extensive radio (and web) offerings not only television.

Of course, that still doesn't make sense because to the best of my knowledge you don't need a license of any kind to listen to the radio.

Anyway, perhaps blind people want to listen to the TV. There are a lot of programs that could make sense even if you can hear but not see them.

> you don't need a license of any kind to listen to the radio.

I believe you did once upon a time, but I guess they were phased out as TVs became more popular.

>The first supplementary licence fee for colour television was introduced in January 1968. Radio-only licences were abolished in February 1971 (along with the requirement for a separate licence for car radios).

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmcu...

and audio description[1]!

I'm no fan of national broadcasters as a concept, but I have to say, the UK is excellent when it comes to audio description, much more so than any (English speaking) country I'm aware of. It's not just the BBC either, Sky and other private broadcasters also have relatively high standards.

For years, the only English AD you could get for extremely popular HBO shows, like Game of Thrones for example, were pirated British rips from Sky, as HBO famously refused to provide the service.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_description

The TV license is certainly bit ridiculous, but being legally blind doesn't necessarily mean you can't see at all, just you fall below the legal threshold where it's judged that poor sight will interfere with your day-to-day life. Lots of people registered as blind can still watch the TV just fine even if they won't be able to see the detail.

The threshold is a lot higher than people think. I would be at the level of legal blindness without my glasses. I use my phone without glasses daily. A small laptop screen without glasses would be alright too, but desktop monitors are too big.

Of course, to be considered legally blind, your vision has to be that bad with the best correction available. (Below 20/200)

Don't want to pay the full amount? Simply get a black and white television, now it's 70% off.

I mean, TV is an audiovisual medium. Audio/Visual. 50/50. Blind people can still listen to the TV (though arguably not have half the experience). The real question is if deaf people get the same discount.

In Japan there was an infamous political party focused on getting rid of the hated TV licence system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZG95grO-vc

In Japan the vast majority of people stopped paying their TV license after a string of NHK scandals and there's no penalty for failing to pay either.

It's just not enforced. Also the party platform wasn't to get rid of the license system but to encrypt the broadcast signal so that only willing NHK viewers would pay for the license.

The penalty for not paying the TV license is dealing with their harassment specialists (aka fee collectors)

There's a great, and somewhat terrifying character relating to this, the "NHK Fee Collector" in Haruki Murakami's 1Q84.

Some people actually voted them into office as a joke and they turned out to be a bunch of racists with some really awful views and were overall absolute shite politicians. Who could have imagined?

Pedantry time! At least in Germany, the "Rundfunkbeitrag" is not a tax, but more like a fee. Taxes go into the overall budget of the collecting party who then uses a part of the budget to fund something. The broadcasting fee can only be used for the broadcasting system and does not go through the country's budget. This means to increase the broadcasting budget, the fee has to be increased and it can't be subsidized by increasing the budget without increasing the tax.

Many European countries are worse about it than the UK; even people who do not own a television are required by law to pay.

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

In Sweden there was this whole thing where you apparently had to pay even if you only owned a laptop.

In France you pay the copyright infringement tax on every hard drive / SSD / storage you purchase. But it’s still forbidden to pirate movies.

It is not "copyright infringement" tax. It's called a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy and it's a rather common thing, at least in all of Europe.

Seems close enough. The article even discusses how it is "often considered a compensation for illegal file sharing". And even if it's common, that doesn't make it any less unfair. (Indeed, the longest section of the article is titled "Questions on fairness".)

It is often _confused_ with. It does not imply it is.

I read that as “Pirate” copying levy. Took a few takes to read it as “Private”.

* Slaps 22TiB SMR drive * This baby can fit so many Linux ISOs on it.

I remember that in Poland electronic repair shops offered companies removal of the TV demodulator from TV sets used as monitors. That was necessary for the TV not to count as a TV receiver and thus not to generate the fee liability.

I think there also were some large cases where a company who owned a car fleet had to pay for the car radios.

Finland requires a radio license fee for taxis, or at least did 21 years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/07/andrewosborn

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2542291.stm

that seems fine to me. whatever they want to call it, if it applies to everybody it's just a tax and they're using tax dollars to fund some TV content and/or infrastrcture. that's all totally normal.

the absurd part is restricting that tax to only people who watch TV, and trying to do surveillance and enforcement to determine whether or not somebody is eligible for a TV tax.

Well, first they wanted to tax everyone a bit to pay for the BBC. And then someone said that would let the government easily pressure the BBC by withholding funds. And then someone said let's let the BBC collect it's own tax then. And someone else said that would be illegal to make people pay for the BBC if they aren't actually receiving any services from the BBC. And so here we are. So they wrote in this provision that in practice exempts precisely zero people but everyone tries to chase after anyway, contorting themselves through hoops to make it apply.

"Any services from the BBC" means any. TV broadcast, radio broadcast, or internet streaming. And because the actual intention was to make everyone pay, the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one. If you have a computer and the Internet, you could receive internet streaming.

And then you have more stupid rules, like even though they're collecting a tax, they're not tax collectors so they don't have any authority to come into your house, so they invent weird ways to detect if you have a TV or not.

Presumably a left wing government would remove all this stuff and just make it a tax.

This isn't accurate, that's just what they want people to think. In practice it exempts most people below the age of about 30, most of whom do not consume any media within the scope of the TV license.

> the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one.

That's not true. You're allowed to own equipment capable of receiving licensed broadcasts, all that matters is that you don't.

> the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one. If you have a computer and the Internet, you could receive internet streaming.

That's not true, according to https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence.

> You do not need a TV Licence to watch:

> • streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus

> • on-demand TV through services like All 4 and Amazon Prime Video

> • videos on websites like YouTube

> • videos or DVDs

The whole scheme seems like something an American would come up with: paying for public services with regressive user fees instead of broad-based progressive taxation.

But it's unheard of (for media[1]) in the US and common in Europe.

[1]The closest thing we have here might be parking passes for state parks, even unpopular ones where free parking would remain mostly empty.

This fee is hot topic in Germany. Our French friends also enjoy ARTE[1] but seem not to suffer anymore from this ridiculous fee. Actually I’m surprised that the Swiss fee is even higher, despite everything in the Swiss is expensive.

[1] Big parts of our public television suck. But ARTE is awesome!

    * Borgen
    * Occupied
    * Mit offenen Karten
    * Karambolage
    * …

PS: ARTE is watchable outside of France and Germany in a lot of countries in Europe. Poland, Spain, Austria, Netherlands, Czech and so on.

Occupied is outstanding, and available in the U.S. on Netflix.

I didn't find it on Netflix, but it seems to be available on Amazon Prime Video.

Yes. Netflix seems to “import” public television series from Europe into their paid subscription.

While the public television may suck, it still pays for the only real Independent news coverage in Germany. No matter what you think of the ARD or ZDF and their management boards, the work of the Deutschlandfunk and regional broadcasters is outstanding and a pillar of a free democracy.

I hate having to pay for distribution licenses for soccer games, but if that ensures continued support for high-quality journalism, so be it.

> I hate having to pay for distribution licenses for soccer games, but if that ensures continued support for high-quality journalism, so be it.

You sound like you're in an abusive relationship. Get help while you still can.

It sounds like you have lost your tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to acknowledge things aren’t merely black or white. I don’t blame you; it’s common these days.

DLF is the other high quality program aside from ARTE!

Regarding the content, it is for all and it is fine that 90% are not interesting for me. I struggle with the selection of news presented by ARD/ZDF, missing positiv news.

Soccer is interesting for many but I don’t get why the stream it live and remove it afterwards from the archives. If the organizer doesn’t want public reports with images I would exclude them. More time for broad reports about other sports (cycling, chess, esports…).

So independent that they parrot the ideology of the ruling parties. If you want to pay for them then be my guest but I'd rather not.

You say that, but I highly doubt you actually listen to the radio or podcast formats or view lots of the ZDF productions that are very much critical of the established parties, and regularly publish investigative research.

Journalists tend to have a high education background and thus tend to hold more progressive and liberal opinions, but that’s unavoidable. The public broadcast services are still miles ahead in terms of unbiased reporting than privately owned publications in Germany.

And having said all that; would you really want to have to choose between Fox News and ABC? Journalism should not depend on private interests. I’m not claiming it’s free of political influence either, but at least public broadcast includes provisions to prevent that. The alternative is worse.

I don't like being forced to pay for ARTE no matter how much you like it. I don't think this kind of entertainment has any value.

When I was studying at the university, I shared a privately owned house with some other people. We did not have a TV license, but I wanted to buy a big screen TV to use as computer monitor in my room.

I found out that in my country you can have a third-party, approved technician come to your house to disable the tuner portion of your TV so that you would not have to pay any television license. Around this time analog broadcasting was already being phased out or had already completely shut down in my country. And although some kind of digital broadcasting over air-waves exists to replace it, most people do not use that. Instead, you'll typically buy a subscribtion via cable or via IPTV or via sattelite, all of which come with a separate box that plugs into your TV via HDMI instead of relying on the tuner in your TV, even if that tuner can decode digitally broadcast radio signals. So the tuner in the TV was not serving much of a purpose anyway, even if I'd ever want to use the TV as a TV.

I paid a technician a bit of money to come disable the tuner for me in my newly bought 55" LED TV. I was imagining that he'd be opening the TV and carefully removing some essential part. What he actually did was take a plier and break the input for the tuner and then put a small piece of tape over it. Simple solutions, I guess. Then, I think I also got them to write a letter for me confirming that the tuner had been disabled.

It cost me a little bit of money, but not too much. Less than paying the TV license fee for that and subsequent years I was staying in that house anyway.

These days, I still have the TV. I put it in my grandfather's house a few years ago so he could use it. He already pays TV license fee and has a digital receiver. It has HDMI out which goes in to the TV. So he is not inconvenienced by the broken tuner input of the TV either, just like I expected back then that this disabling of the tuner would never be a problem even if I ever wanted to use it as a TV.

It does seem kind of silly now, that I paid someone to come break the input for a portion of the TV that was never going to be needed even if you wanted to use it as a TV. But I still think it was worth it, and that it saved me from worrying about inspections. Even though no inspection ever happened at the house either back in the days where I was using it as a monitor for my computer.

As a UK resident and TV owner (who does not need a license), I wouldn't even mind that much if I was required to pay just for TV ownership. It's the "enforcement" system that's utterly broken (although I have no idea how it compares to other countries).

We have this ridiculous situation where I'm not required to pay (so I don't), yet the TV licensing people are allowed (required?) to send me junk mail week after week trying to trick me into thinking I do need to pay them.

What is the reason that you don't have to pay?

I don't watch broadcast TV or other such TV-license-related services. My TV is a glorified computer monitor slash media player.

Yeah, Austria had the british system for a while, but after everyone started streaming (because the content is better and prices are actually cheaper) they changed it so every household needs to pay.

Now I'm forced to pay for old sitcoms, astrology shows, soccer stuff and other useless things I don't watch anyways...

So, basically "how tax works"? You pay into a common good, whether you use it or not.

The absurdity in the UK is that it's a License fee and that there is this whole absurd enforcement system. In other countries it's a tax if you don't pay it, you are essentially not paying your taxes. I am OK with a universal tax for a universal service even if I don't use that service. What I am not okay with is fraudulent threatening letters, weirdos creeping in the bushes trying to see if I am watching TV and goons showing up at my front door to collect what they think I owe them.

Had a white van with huge antennas parked out front for a few days when they were refusing to believe that a large share house of young people didn't watch TV. This was in 2015. We didn't own a TV nor watch.

The van soon left after a few days but left a full bottle of yellow liquid. Makes a fun story, but yeah they threaten you a bunch and it's quite sad.

I lived on the Isle of Man for a few years back in the 90's. The white van would be spotted on the ferry coming over and a small notice in the paper would appear. Everyone hid their TVs for a couple of weeks, until the paper said the van was back on the ferry.

It sounds so farcical now, in our age of ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.

I doubt what you saw was a TV licensing van in 2015. They stopped doing the van stuff in the late 90s / early 2000s.

Even if they could “detect” TV in your house they’d have no way of knowing if it’s a live broadcast or streaming/on demand.

It may have been an OB van or something else.

I know, I think this was always a joke, especially with the yellow liquid.

It's the same situation in German except they removed the TV requirement since the broadcasters put up token online content that you can watch/read on your phone an surely everyone has one of those. So no more visits from cunts trying to get you or your co-inhabitants to admit that you have a TV because ist now a 100% mandatory fee but it's still not officially a tax though and therefore collected by a non-government entity who have had to rebrand due to how unpopular they are.

It's basically a whole parallel tax collection system, which is truly nuts. Like the administrative overhead alone surely outweighs any abstract concerns about independence from government, which doesn't really exist in the UK anyway.

What's when more mental is that they are essentially all funding state propaganda agencies and so you're literally paying to be propagandised.

Not that much of none state media is really that much better to be honest.

We all pay to receive propaganda, be it governmental or not. A private TV channel will spread the ideology of their owners, and it is usually an ideology that is useful to them.

With private channels you can choose which ones to fund. Not so much with forced TV license fees for state broadcasters.

The lines that really got me in this post were:

> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.

and

>...Cas Scott has said that the letters are not sought by TVL/BBC agents who make street visits.

Like, they show up at your home and ask to physically view your TV to make sure you aren't watching TV! It's so incredibly bonkers to me, I'm laughing out loud at work at the mental image!

Never change, UK, never change.

It’s weird. They don’t have any actual authority, so if they turn up you can just say “No”.

In my seven years of living in the UK, I’ve paid the TV licence for two years, and had one visit (who I shut the door on).

depends on the system, austria for example used to say if you don't have a radio or tv you do not need to pay.

As of 2024 you pay even if you have no tv, which means the overhead is probably near zero, as you already have lists of where people live.

Same here in Norway.

This gets raised every charter renewal and they always find the administrative overhead of e.g. collecting Netflix subscriptions, etc. is pro rata higher than the overhead for the licence fee.

I interpreted the parent as suggesting "just pay for it out of general tax revenue", which makes a lot of sense to me. No additional administration and enforcement required.

This is how Australia's public broadcaster is funded. But it means politicians directly decide its budget, which makes it a political football.

Politicians also decide on the license fees even where they are oficially not a tax.

The purpose is psychological to attach a monetary value to the government TV channels, which makes the viewer consider them valuable and therefore trustable.

No. It really isn't.

Oh it gets weirder in Germany! See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beitragsservice_von_ARD,_ZDF_u...

The tv license collection agency employs more than a 1000 people.

And this is in spite of the fact that nearly every household has to pay that €18.36 per month.

> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.

Just the thought of this is funny. What kind of uniforms do TV Officers wear? Do they get to carry a weapon? What happens if they find you watching a TV?

Amazing.

They wear the same uniforms that police detectives usually wear.

They wear a shirt and tie. No weapon. You don't have to answer the door to them. You don't have to let them in. However they are generally lieing scumbags who suggest that they are allowed in.

If they catch you watching TV they will report you for a £1000 fine and a criminal record. Failing to pay it will land you in prison.

I spent years without a license, you don't need one for YouTube and Netflix. I unplugged the aerial wire. You do need it for any live TV or BBC catch up TV. I got visited once during that time and he kept asking to come in, I kept telling him I didn't need to let him. He kept asking what I watch on TV, I told him politely, that was none of his concern.

If they suspect you are harboring an illegal TV then they will come back with a warrant and the police!

This is such a broken and dystopian situation. The UK is such a nanny state.

It's a horrible situation which I am convinced preys on the vulnerable.

We've been sent letters on an almost monthly basis claiming that an officer is "scheduled" to make a visit, that we have a "ten day window" to respond before they take action, etc... . Nothing ever happens and no one ever visits.

I know that you don't have to let the enforcement folk in, and if they turn up I'll politely ask to see their search warrant or for them to mind their own business. But lots of people don't know this and are conditioned to be passive. Prosecutions include the mentally vulnerable and people whose finances are handled by the council. There are thousands every year. Three quarters of the prosecutions are against women, and it makes up more than a quarter of prosecutions against women.

Sounds like a waste of public resources. Are you supposed to pay if you watch live TV over streaming services instead of using an antenna?

Yep https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/w...

Incredible. And people actually let these "TV inspectors" into their homes?

Yes, in fact there are tens of thousands of convictions every year. They disproportionately target vulnerable people like the disabled, migrants, and single mothers. The kinds of people who are likely to be at home when they come knocking during working hours, and who might have a lot of other things on their plate or might not be fully informed, I guess. There's some proper dystopian examples, for example a woman with Down's syndrome whose council pleaded guilty on her behalf, because it manages her finances. It's horrific.

The Guardian wrote an article about it earlier this year: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/29/tv-licence-fee...

> you don't need one for YouTube and Netflix

Not strictly true, if you watch television channels live over YouTube you need one

https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/w...

You can be sent to jail if you do not have a licence, although it is rare

We had those in Austria (they changed it so everybody is forced to pay for that now...). They basically have no rights themselves, but they pretended to do and even try to force you to allow them to enter so they can check that you have no TV receiver (including the built in ones in the TV) and say that they will come with the police and a search warrant if you deny them. It doesn't even matter if you have no antenna or no coax cable.

I find the thought that government officials would routinely carry weapons is massively more dystopian than anything the BBC can come up with.

It's not just the UK, many countries have a government-run TV network, and they want that network to be subsidized only by the people actually watching TV, not random taxpayers who don't benefit from it.

If you were to design such a system in the 2020's, you could just put a DRM scheme on your broadcast and demand payment only from the people who actually want to watch that network specifically, but that technology wasn't yet available when such systems were designed.

Another claimed benefit of this way of doing things is the government's ability to produce programs that aren't commercially viable, e.g. targetting specific populations, minorities who speak a niche language, distributing important public information in a non-sensational way etc.

Most of these points are moot with the advent of the internet, though, hence why many countries want to or have abolished these licensing systems.

> they want that network to be subsidized only by the people actually watching TV, not random taxpayers who don't benefit from it.

Eh, the 2 countries I know charge people if they have a device capable of viewing the TV/radio/the TV/radio stations' online offer, so anyone with a smartphone (and who doesn't have a smartphone?) are also require to pay the license fee, even if they don't have a TV or radio at home.

There's a joke that since the license fee is charged if you have equipment theoretically capable of viewing TV, then maybe people should apply for government child allowance, since they have equipment theoretically able to make them parents.

It's a tax but for some reason making it separate from the normal tax system makes it harder for the government to force political views on it... even though the government could easily pass a law saying "the board of directors of the BBC shall go to jail unless all reporting favours the Tories"

I think that's actually a reasonable point of view. The Brits I know have a feeling of ownership towards the BBC that they don't towards other public affordances.

...Apart from the NHS, that is. Which hardly prevented the Tories from sabotaging it for private profit.

Maybe the Conservatives (or their donors) didn't care quite as much about the Beeb? There's not a lot of money in it, and the gestures they did make towards it seemed to keep it from exposing too many of their other "projects", or maybe it was toothless all along. I dunno.

Still, it's an excellent broadcaster - still, in my opinion, the gold-standard in the English-speaking world - even if (perhaps) diminished from what it once was.

At least it’s optional in the uk if you don’t have a tv. In Germany you have to pay it no matter what

In Germany, you cannot even legally listen to the radio without such a license (GEZ). It's also slightly more expensive than the UK TV License, coming in just under Netflix' premium plan (while offering mostly shite in return).

To clarify: currently, it doesn’t matter what you actually do (listen to radio, own a radio, own a TV…), everyone has to pay, unless they are exempt (due to low income, other social security, or being deaf and blind at the same time). So it doesn’t matter if you listen to radio or not. You (or the household you live in to be exact) has to pay.

That's correct. It's sufficient that you in theory could listen to the radio, and it is assumed that pretty much everyone could.

In Germany, many people went to jail for not paying it.

It's equally hilarious and sobering travelling to the US as European, turning on a TV and finding more advertising than programming.

You don't have to watch those ads or TV for that matter. With the licensing fees on the other hand you do not get a choice.

>Finding out it was real

It's real in the sense a thing called a TV Licence exists but the TV Licence enforcers are just an arm from the BBC who larp as a government organisation to threaten people.

So in a sense it's real but it's also not.

Worth noting that the service is mostly advertising free.

I learned about it when they knocked on my door (UK). Said I didn’t have a TV to which they replied they’d like to look around inside to confirm. LOL no.

It may be funny but it's one way of funding public broadcasting which is, at least to a minor degree, independent of government interference.

Oi! Ave you got a loicense fer dat TV there mate?!

> loicense

Should obviously be spelt loicence.

You've never had the misfortune of discovering a Cat Detector Van camped outside your flat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5MnyRZLd8A

Yeah, it’s pretty annoying.

Publicly funded media is a great thing to have, and the intention of TV License is to fund it independently from interference from the government of the day. In Australia there’s frequently stories about governments cutting ABC funding, which TV License is supposed to avoid entirely.

But the implementation in practice just sucks. It’s baffling to think of how much money is wasted on administering this additional tax program, sending out all these pretty aggressive letters, maintaining the website, and paying the real “inspectors” to knock on peoples doors.

> Publicly funded media is a great thing to have

Depends on the kind of media.

Educational content? Sure.

News? Not going to be impartial so I'd rather be able to pick my poison - otherwise it's just propaganda.

Sports? A waste of money in my view and the state should not decide what kind of entertainment gets to exist.

Inane talks shows with hosts taking home ridiculous salaries which are funded by extorting money from people who are barely able to pay for their basic needs? Unjustifiable.

> News? Not going to be impartial so I'd rather be able to pick my poison - otherwise it's just propaganda.

Why can't publicly funded media be impartial?

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