UK still has 13,000 black-and-white TVs
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The web has numerous examples of people with no TV, who have told the relevant body this, and yet nonetheless receive an endless stream of threatening letters. The letters tend to follow the same pattern; polite reminders to harsh reminders to threats of discovery and huge fines, and then back to polite reminders again. Essentially, their model is to assume that anyone without a TV is lying, and does have a TV. It's probably quite effective and certainly a lot cheaper than trying to keep track of who actually doesn't have a TV.
So, if you've got a TV (that you use to receive broadcast transmissions - you don't need a licence just to own the TV, you need it for some of its possible uses) in the UK and you have no TV licence, you can be pretty sure that you can ignore the letters and, should a private citizen working for Capita come to the door, you need not answer or let them in or even talk to them. The only way they could demand entry would be with a suitable court document and accompanied by an officer of the court (who frankly has better things to do with his time), but to get that document they need reasonable evidence, and simply not having a TV licence is not actually considered evidence of illegally using a TV to receive broadcast transmissions.
I was never sure whether the vans were more than an urban myth.
That said, it requires not just the equipment to do so, but also the competence and training, and whilst it's not impossible, licence inspectors are just whoever Capita managed to hire that month; maintaining a cadre of competent people to operate that equipment would be a headache and an expense that Capita simply aren't interested in.
Far, far cheaper to simply have that big list of addresses (I understand they've got a list of every address in the UK that ever had a TV licence associated with it) and just assume that every address on that list that doesn't currently have a TV licence is a licence-dodger. Every so often it presumably gets pruned for addresses that no longer exist, but otherwise the rate of false positive will be a minor annoyance in the scheme and certainly not worth the hassle and expense of more sophisticated methods. Threatening letters and intimidating adverts do the job.
I remember asking my Elec Eng lecturer at Uni whether they could tell between a colour and B&W TV, and he thought not.
They declined to tell me how the machine worked, sadly.
The database of TV owners is the easier way to catch people. In the UK if you buy or rent a TV (or other bit of equipment that can be used to watch/record TV programmes[1]) from a shop (not private sale) then the seller has a duty to collect your name and address and report this to the TV Licensing authorities.
Same (I think) for people who sign up to any other form of TV programme distribution: Sky, BT Vision, Virgin Media, etc.
They then look for people who've got Sky or have just bought a TV and that don't have a license. That'll get the vast majority of people.
Then there's the people that either don't have a TV (or anything else similar), or who have one but don't use it to watch broadcast TV.
I had a period where I didn't have a TV and used to get hassled by letter once a month. Some people in a similar situation would refuse to let the inspectors into their house and endured endless letters, phone calls and visits. I just let the bloke in to look around, he saw there was no telly and left. The letters and hassle stopped after that.
The rules about what you do and don't need a TV License for make it even more difficult:-
" The law states that you need to be covered by a TV Licence if you watch or record television programmes, on any device, as they're being shown on TV. This includes TVs, computers, mobile phones, games consoles, digital boxes and Blu-ray/DVD/VHS recorders.
You don't need a licence if you don't use any of these devices to watch or record television programmes as they're being shown on TV - for example, if you use your TV only to watch DVDs or play video games, or you only watch ‘catch up’ services like BBC iPlayer or 4oD. "
It really hasn't caught up with the digital age. All they've done is add endless extra layers and clauses to the legislation to make it horribly complex.
1. A gross simplication. The actual definition is even more complex (as with most UK legal stuff) than this.
As an English speaking international student, most of the ESL international students brought their letters to me and they were quite scared by them. I had to explain that everything was fine, we just needed to call the company and tell them that they didn't have a TV.
That being said, most of the money from the TV license goes to the BBC, and since I'm 50/50 iPlayer and lovefilm, I don't mind paying that TV license. I'd rather better BBC shows than having to fork out for, say, Sky.
This is not strictly true. I've had no TV license for several years; after the first letter, I filled in the "declaration of no live TV signal" form (or whatever it's called) on their website, and since then, they haven't bothered me once. This is despite having a TV clearly visible through my living-room window (that I use exclusively for games and DVDs). Maybe I'm just lucky.
That said, I feel it slightly ridiculous that you need a TV license (which is for funding the BBC) to watch live TV, even if you never watch any BBC channels -- but you don't need one to listen to BBC radio stations, or use their website, or even stream BBC shows on iPlayer after broadcast. If I didn't suspect it'd pave the way for the government to cannibalise their funding, I'd say it'd make much more sense for the BBC to be funded through general taxation instead of the current horribly over-engineered TV license system.
Fair enough. I think you must just have been lucky. I know people who have told them over and over and over again to no avail (and indeed, you can find many such people on the web).
(not to mention seeing varying shades of light behind the curtain)
Several times in the past I have looked up information on them, and all I find seems to be in the realm of urban legend -slash- marketing ploy.
What is the physical principle behind this tech? Does anyone have reliable information?
I very much doubt that they exist now, if they ever did. It just isn't cost efficient compared to sending out letters and low paid inspectors who peer through windows looking for people watching TV.
I'm not sure if modern TVs will even emit anything obvious since the connection from the decoder to the panel is covered in EMI shielding.
[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename) [2] : http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/foi-administering-the-tv-...
So this means people plugged a digital converter to their B&W TVs?
If I have children/grandchildren I hope they prevent me from doing something like that.
Why? If you are an elderly person who has a TV set that they like why change it for a newfangled colour one with a bunch of features that they are not going to use? They just get their grandkids to install a Freeview box and connect it to the TV and they are happy once more.
(During the last thirty years of their marriage my parents had two TVs, both CRTs. Just now they bought a new plasma TV. They never buy the cheap stuff, but they always try to use everything for as long as possible, a philosophy I’m also quite fond of. Nevertheless I’m not holding my breath for this new TV also lasting 15 years. The guy my parents bought it from – a nice gumpy old fellow, excellent electrician but no longer really fitting into this world – was pretty pessimistic about the prospects of this TV lasting any more than four, five years. Oh, and this thing is a computer. You can access the internet and install apps and all that crap. Nothing my parents will ever use, but if you buy a good panel that’s what you get. If you want it or not. At least it works perfectly fine as a dumb monitor for the cable box. Another of these unpleasant things of the modern age. However, I wonder what happens when Panasonic stops updating this TV, should it last that long, which it probably will. Suddenly having an old TV is no longer harmless.)
I don't know how much energy an old vacuum tube TV consumes but it doesn't seem to be a small number. Also the CRT uses a lot of energy as well.
(at least all B&W TVs I saw used vacuum tubes, as some of the (old) colour TVs)
I'm not advocating for a 60' TV with bells and whistles, a 22', 24' LCD simple TV should be fine
Every little bit doesn’t matter. That’s an ass backwards way of going about reducing power consumption, like firing the gardner in the White House to reduce the deficit.
Other stats show that around 2% of households in the UK do not have a TV (or at least a license).
As the numbers increase due to better on demand service, I'm betting the television license rules will change.
In the UK they've made it more complex that a license is required (for your home address) if you watch live TV on any device (including a computer or smartphone).
I'm not a legal scholar, but I think it was with reference to the fact that when the law was written, the only purpose a TV could reasonably have was to watch the broadcasts of the BBC, and so there was no point in clarifying this in the language of the law. With the advent of VCR's, it became perfectly reasonable to own a TV for other purposes than watching broadcast TV, and the court ruled that the intent of the law was to license watching TV, not owning a TV.
There are 360,000 people registered as partially-sighted in the UK, although around a third of those are over 75 (and so get a free license anyway). I imagine this must count for a fair proportion of those 13,000 TVs.
Now that we've gone through digital switchover, there are no purely B&W TV tuners - every digital set-top box can receive colour pictures, even if the TV can't display them.
Surely, in this case, the Black and White licence is obsolete?
(Incidentally, I dropped my TV licence this year - I just wasn't using it enough to justify the cost. What little TV I view now is on-demand through the computer. With fibre-optic broadband - paid for with the money saved by not having a TV licence - I can receive an HD picture on BBC iPlayer and it's actually better than the old TV reception.)
You can get set top boxes to receive digital transmissions if you don't have a suitable TV. I'm sure these would work with a B&W TV if you wanted. I believe some groups (the elderly?) were offered subsidised set top boxes.