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Comment by wigster | Hacker News Reader

i'm beginning to think i'm the only one that DOES pay it.

It’s not really a topic of conversation that I’d bring up, but I know many people who do pay it so you aren’t the only one.

I don’t because I don’t use anything that requires me to, not from a moral standpoint. The BBC has given me a lot of fantastic content over the years but I’ve just stopped consuming most television over the past 5 years or so.

I don't pay it because I don't watch television anymore, live or otherwise.

However I do find the overreach of claiming I need to pay the license if I watch any form of live broadcast is ridiculous. If I wanted to watch the occasional live stream of a football game online via Amazon Prime then I would need to pay the license fee.

that's too far, agreed, although I would be extremely shocked if anyone has been prosecuted for that

People are prosecuted for this with zero evidence other than an ‘admission’, with the admission being as nebulous as ‘yeah the tv is on’.

How can you prove someone was watching TV in court? As far as I’m aware you can’t, but the court sides with Capita generally. Please don’t bring up the TV detecting vans as evidence.

none of this is evidence anyone has been prosecuted for watching live football from a streaming service

No, I do too, and I’m happy to do so. I’ve always felt it’s a useful brake on over-commercialisation of other channels, although perhaps less effective now than it once was. I do enjoy quite a bit of the BBC’s output as well.

I feel there's a huge problem in this debate, which is that the people who don't like it are extremely vocal, and the people who do like it and quietly use and enjoy it without necessarily adoring it, perhaps like you, who I suspect are a majority, are just not really represented in the conversation, and the people who love it, like me, do not really have a central reference point from which to draw power from unlike the people who don't like it, who have the entire right-wing media crowing about it at every opportunity

Not to mention the people who are extremely vocal about how horrible and woke it is for having too many minorities and that Mr Lineker also overlaps heavily with people who have watched it continuously for 50 years, wouldn't dream of switching over to newfangled channels like Channel 4 and don't know what an Amazon is...

I think I'm one of those, minus the last bit about channel 4 and Amazon.

You might be underrating my ardour on this as I've said my piece at greater length before.

I've always been in favour of (something like) the license fee to fund a non-commercial national public service broadcaster. Public service broadcasting is incredibly important otherwise it's all just commercial interests and you end up with the kind of nonsense you get in the TV landscape in the USA: low quality content, far too many ads, dominance of hyper-partisan "news", etc.

And if you look at what the BBC does - the TV channels, iPlayer, the national radio stations, local radio, news, the world service, the ground-breaking content they've created over the decades, and of course licensing/reselling content - it's incredibly impressive and, to me at any rate, represents incredibly good value for money as compared to other providers.

The TV license costs about the same as an annual Netflix subscription but the BBC is able to do so much more with that money than Netflix are. Doesn't even compare in my mind.

agreed on every point

If you believe in it, then pay. Just leave the rest alone that want no part of it.

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