I think the funding and governance (by Royal Charter) of the BBC have historically provided a huge benefit to society in the UK.
Advertising free children’s TV (and radio) may have delayed the onset or rampant consumerism fuelled by commercial TV elsewhere.
The BBC microcomputer project is arguably the origin of ARM CPU’s.
Initially the license fee was for radios, I can’t find a reference but I remember being told as a child that politicians saw the risks of radio propaganda and legislated to mandate broadcast media to be politically unbiased .
It’s interesting seeing suggestions on the recent threads about EU funding for a WhatsApp alternative - perhaps the license fee could also fund the infrastructure for something like signal.
What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society.
Strongly agreed. Having lived in the US for a good number of years now I can see how the idea of vans roaming looking for TV viewers is baffling, but the public TV offering by the BBC, while definitely not perfect, is miles ahead of both the public and network offerings on US TV (though credit to the likes of PBS and NPR for doing miraculous work with a fraction of the budget!). I even got my start in computing from the BBC Micro machines at school.
Pay for a recurring service via a one-off payment? What could go wrong?!
Aside from that, a TV license is £157 a year. Let's say a TV lasts three years (which feels conservative, pretty sure I had my last TV for eight), you'd need to get the buyer to pay an extra £471 when they purchase their TV. How is front-loading such a payment in the interests of the viewer? Not to mention you don't have to pay the fee if you're only watching streaming services like Netflix.
You can set the rate of the tax to account for the time value of money, charging less up front than you would for the sum total of the subscription over the life of the device.
You could argue that increasing the up front cost is a regressive tax, but you should be able to more than make up for that by not needing to pay fleets of trucks to drive around all day looking to find TV tax scofflaws.
While I think that having some publicly funded radio/TV is a really good thing, the idea of the UK TV license and the subsequent enforcement is not. My friends elderly mother does not have or want a TV. She is constantly harassed and threatened by UK license enforcement. Her son has invited them into her home on numerous occasions, hoping that the legal threats and visits would cease, but to this day they have not. I object to having my license fee money spent on such abuse of vulnerable people.
Yeah. My father in law had the same experience. He once took an enforcement person into his house and insisted they go through the house together and conduct an exhaustive search of all the places a TV could be. "Perhaps it's in the cistern of the toilet? Let's look!...Not there? Perhaps it's in the bread bin..." etc etc
It is really bad the way they do this, and having seen the threatening letters they send out they could be very frightening. The letters were on the lines of "Our detectors have found that you have a TV and you have to pay the license fee or we'll send bailiffs around, take you to court etc", and the one I received once (when i too didn't have a TV) was printed on red paper.
People have clearly noticed the social and political issues with advertising for a very long time now. The issue is that it's hard to rally against one of the most lucrative businesses ever to exist that inherently has an extreme amount of messaging power to defend itself.
I think the issue is people really like watching TV and movies, and continuing to watch the content shows they are OK with all the ads. Never have people had more access to other content, or other ways of entertaining themselves.
I have no idea how people put up with the NFL in the US.
During the early days of sports streaming (sometimes still) you'd find a stream with a live feed of the stadium broadcast without the ads. During the commercial breaks you'd be able to watch what was on the megatron (camera panning crowd, in-stadium entertainment).
I would pay a massive premium to have access to that feed for every sports broadcast. Gabe Newell said it best about piracy offering the best experience.
It's also worth noting that advertising is nearly a necessity in an industrialized society. Production of goods has high capital upfront costs and marginal costs that become negligible at scale. You can't get that scale without advertising or a government-mandated monopoly. Or, at least, you can't get that scale quickly enough.
Trees (companies) compete for sunlight (purchases) and adverisements are their trunks.
They 'waste' enormous amount of energy on trunks not because longer trunks increase the amount of sunlight. They just lower the probability of being overshadowed by the others.
If somehow trees could agree on how high the trunk should be at most they could limit this waste.
Instead they literally grow trunks as long as the physical laws allow.
Instead of tons of in your face advertising everywhere you could have just one goverment manager directory of stuff and services. Where companies could register their products, services, pricing.
Of coure there would be law breakers and positive publications about brands paid for under the table but I think overt ban would lead to economy wasting much less money on advertising to outcompete itself.
I don't think such a drastic change will ever happen. Large percentage of our culture is created directly for the purposes of advertising. So advert free society would be different in so many ways. But I would bet it wouldn't be worse. And if it was, we could just lift the ban and see trunks grow back.
Instead they literally grow trunks as long as the physical laws allow.
In some cases this was literally true, as fast food franchises would keep raising their logo signs higher and higher until municipalities set height limits.
Driving door to door is insane for me. They'd be much better off if they funded BBC from tax directly. People should pay for it to exist whether they have TV or not becuse everybody benefits(?) from culture creatd by BBC.
Yes, you can. Please do. It would be a net benefit to humanity if everyone did that. Capita only use the bullying tactics because they think that it will get them an increased return. However, they are technically nothing more than very pushy sales agents trying to sell you something. If everyone told them to get stuffed, there's an extremely slim chance that they might choose a more pleasant tactic. I wouldn't hold one's breath though.
You can also write to Capita and tell them that they are not welcome on your property, and then they can't even walk up to your front door. If you have a sticker on your front door rejecting cold callers and door-to-door sales, then they are trespassing as soon as they knock. Call the police if they don't leave. I have heard enough stories of Capita agents doing misdeeds once inside that you should not trust them, regardless of how many threats they make. The only circumstances under which you should ever let them in is if they are accompanied by police with a search warrant.
You can also write to them and tell them that you view their threatening letters as harassment, and that they must stop sending them. You don't need to tell them your name - just your address.
Unless they come with an actual search warrant (which is rare, but can happen [0] as I wrote in a cousin thread, sometimes with the police assist), yes, you can.
Capital/TVL have no inherent power to enter your premises unless invited - but you can't just throw them out after inviting them in.
I've been wondering this myself. Related to this; I was wondering the other day why the seemingly sudden rise of people who buy into conspiracy theories like Q-Anon? One possible answer could be that people are feeling like they are "less-than", purposeless, or not wanted. So then my next question was, why is that?
It occurred to me that with the rise of consumerism (apparently skyrocketing starting in the 90's) we've had more and more advertising telling us, "If you just buy this product or service you will [be loved | get more sex | be prettier | get more sex]"
When it was just TV and billboards advertising to you it was bad enough but at least you could look away and/or turn off the TV. With the rise of the Internet there was obviously another increasingly pervasive channel through which advertisers could reach you. But then came the smartphone and now it's like we're carrying a TV with us 24x7, flooding us with messages convincing us we're not good enough. Couple that with ad-supported apps that purposely try to be addictive and we are bombarded even more because we can't just be still anymore. Our constant need to be stimulated has become piggy-backed with messages telling us how inferior we are.
On advertising and consumerism: we may be seeing that come back around. My kids have only watched Amazon Prime, Netflix, etc. and have barely ever seen an ad. We've banned YouTube for multiple reasons.
Has anything really changed? There have always been kids programming that was primarily about selling toys. I'm thinking of Care Bears, GI Joe, Transforms, Voltron, etc...
When shows like that move to Netflix or Amazon Prime the native ads remain, but the interstitials are gone.
That’s true. I guess as an adult, I feel like I notice it more when the writing / photography blatantly and inorganically bring logos and certain products to the forefront.
A family member’s kids were watching a Christmas movie on Netflix, and while I wasn’t watching it, something jarring hit my ears. In the middle of the movie, Santa names the brand and model of a car, and then starts listing its specs as he gets into a car chase and praises its features. A literal car ad built right into the movie.
There’s placement, and then there’s altering the storyline and photography of a scene to achieve the goal of advertising a product.
For example, there’s a difference in someone drinking a can of Coke, versus someone spending 30 seconds talking about how they love Coke, and adjusting the camera angles so that the Coke logo is always front and center.
It’s possible to do product placement that doesn’t take you out of the story. But recent stuff beats you over the head with it in ways that are inconsistent with normal behavior and it’s jarring, takes you out of the moment, and I have no idea how people tolerate it.
I always laugh when lots of the US cop shows we get here in the UK have the good guys prominently using Microsoft equipment... to GOSUB their subroutine, or some similarly authentic "tech speak". With the new AI powered by Product Placement Of The Week, they can enhance the image and miraculously read the plate on the bad guys' vehicle!
> Has anything really changed? There have always been kids programming that was primarily about selling toys
Not on the BBC, that’s my point.
I’m sure there are plenty of people here that remember Blue Peter and sticky-back plastic (unobtanium in my childhood) along with empty washing up liquid bottles with logo redacted (presumably with stick-back plastic)
> perhaps the license fee could also fund the infrastructure for something like signal
Why like signal? Signal has no protections to avoid the same abuse as WhatsApp.
While I would agree with the sentiment, I think that if EU funds anything it will just as likely be much worse than WhatsApp than better than it given their track record (e.g. stupid popups on every damn website that makes life just that extra bit worse).
But there is some hope in that both the french and German governments have adopted Matrix. The benefit of this manner of funding (through adoption and payment for actual services) is that there is actually a customer/provider relationship - and the potential for more direct feedback. That way if it totally sucks you don't end up with a situation where the people authorizing payment/funding are not affected by how badly it sucks.
> Why like signal? Signal has no protections to avoid the same abuse as WhatsApp.
I think something like signal could reasonably have sufficient protections from both a technical and legislative perspective. And for that matter matrix too.
I was not intending to highlight signal as the only possibility, by like signal I guess I meant a small a capable organisation with a clear non profit agenda.
Signal is centralized by design. If they redesign it sure, it can be something that is not centralized by design, but the problem is then it is hardly an open standard, because it is entirely up to whoever is running Signal.
> What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society.
Public broadcasting fuels political division a lot. The most worrying is that you don’t notice it.
It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore. With luck, they may smoothen their beliefs a bit later in life, for the most centrist ones.
To me, public TV, especially BBC, shouldn’t be one-sided as it is now.
I regularly see the BBC criticised by both sides for being one sided. I’m not saying that’s a get out of jail free card but from your comment I genuinely don’t know which side you come down on, which surely says something.
I don't mean to dismiss the complaint. Public media news is weird: it's funded by the government, but it should criticise the government. There's a tension there. But looking at the US news landscape I see that for-profit news is just as if not more compromised.
I have read across the spectrum for years in the UK, the BBC is not especially biased, maybe a little liberal and it ignores poorer people, but almost all media does that in the UK. But the histrionics frim the Tories and Momentum about the BBC is wildly misplaced.
In comparison I never really watched the US "news" until the recent US election, occasionally watching a bit of CNN/ABC/Fox News. But I've been watching it these last few months, a mix of CNN, Fox and CNBC.
I was shocked at how CNN and Fox both present their often extremely partisan and biased opinions as news. They "report" on a story, but just constantly throwing in their own slant, not reporting the facts, but spinning it. CNN is not quite as bad as Fox, but it's still really, really bad.
That's not news to me.
The BBC does not do that. They don't have reporters sit their and rant about stuff, or label huge swathes of the population as X, Y or Z.
While there is bias by omission, or by the order in which they present the news, it's nothing like the 'news' I see coming from America.
We see CNN over here for ages too but they really clipped during the trumps presidency. Probably so much attention by that clown made them think they shall be the messiah who bring him down now matter what and how they report. They really weren't that bad before imo.
The thing with the BBC is that people on both sides of the political spectrum claim it's biased towards the other guys. That at least suggests that its overall balance is relatively neutral, even if specific individual programmes it broadcasts may not be.
I do feel that in recent times, the BBC's big name current affairs programmes have often given politicians of all parties an easy time in interviews, which I think is more worrying as a trend. I think the BBC should still challenge government representatives to explain and if necessary defend their policies, and should also still challenge the Opposition and smaller parties when their own representatives make dubious claims even if they're not currently in power to implement them.
>It is increasingly worrying because when people are exposed to the other side, they immediately « catch fire », wonder why they have been lied to, and never trust public broadcasting anymore.
Compare this to people who watch commercial TV, see an opposing view, and immediately wonder why they're currently being lied to, and go back to trusting their single source of commercial programming.
“To ensure that news, in whatever form, is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.”
Personally I occasionally find that the BBC news website misses the mark, more often on quality than bias but they have a very transparent and available complaints process online that I suggest you use if you have noticed specific instances of bias.
The BBC is currently dedicating hours of airtime a day to educational content to match our primary and secondary curricula because the schools are shut and lots of kids can't access online provisions. And still people complain about the licence fee in terms of whether or not they enjoy BBC gameshows...
What is the point of this license fee in this day and age? Everyone has a TV, so everyone pays the license fee. Wouldn't it be simpler to just use a part of the taxes already collected to go to BBC.
My problem with this type of license fee collection is that it bring forward a number of costs associated with it that could be removed if it went directly from taxes and that today everyone has TV so it doesn't really "tax the rich" that it probably was intended to do in the early days.
No, the idea never was to "tax the rich". The license fees as present in many European countries are not taxes because the broadcasters are independent from the governments, including full control over what they do with _their_ budget. The idea is that the governments cannot (threaten to) cut their budgets to enforce pro-government reporting on public broadcasters.
Not true. I and others I know use a TV only as a screen for videogames and do not watch TV in any form. You explicitly do not need a license just to own a TV.
Interesting, in Croatia it's specifically a fee on owning any type of radio or tv receiver. Nowadays that applies to almost anything, from TVs and car radios to PCs and smartphones.
In Italy it doesn't apply to PCs and smartphones. It does apply to DVB-T dongles though.
It used to be a separate tax, now it's collected as part of the electric bill. You have to opt out explicitly instead of "opting in" by paying; this makes it much worse for people to evade the payment, since they would be making a false statement when opting out. So many people were evading the fee, that it has since been reduced by a third or so.
I've got no TV service here in the US, but a couple large TVs. I watch movies on other media occasionally, but for the most part they're used for video games.
Buying an 80" monitor isn't really cost efficient.
> Wouldn't it be simpler to just use a part of the taxes already collected to go to BBC.
That would make the BBC dependent on the government for its revenue, which definitely isn't desirable. The current system, where the BBC collects its own revenue under the authority of a royal charter, is intended to help insulate it from political interference.
It's how the CBC is structured. They receive funding from taxes and their own revenue streams: merchandizing, advertising, syndication, and so on.
It works. That is, it works until it doesn't.
The CBC is entirely "free" to every Canadian who wants to use it, and it is fantastic. I wish it were expanded in scope.
But there is an opposition that wants it dismantled and moved from government funding at all costs. Usually, the opposition is purely along political lines which is disappointing.
So, I suppose the argument against it being tax-funded is that it become yet another chip in the political game. An argument for tax-funded is that there are no additional fees awaiting those who cannot afford them.
Seems like something of a tossup or...yet to be determined.
The added separation from political influence is big points, but it's rather moot when one group who've already made their mind up will just shout "conspiracy" and then the facts don't matter anyway. That happens here in Canada, to be sure.
I understand the logic between removing it from taxes, but I find it hard to accept that this gave it any degree of independence.
If opposition got in power and wanted to dismantle BBC or CBC, I'm sure that the fact that they gain their funding through a fee rather than tax is not something that would stop them. In the end, the fee was specified and allowed them to use it by some law that was passed in the parliament.
> But there is an opposition that wants it dismantled and moved from government funding at all costs.
I'm still not sure why entertainment needs public money. I mean just look at Marvel, Netflix, Disney... they are all insanely profitable. Billion dollars profitable.
When you make content that people want to watch, it just works.
That just sounds like paperwork. Legislation forcing people to pay a “TV license” and legislation forcing people to pay more tax and then transferring those tax funds to the BBC is effectively the same thing.
Despite your feelings on the issue, the difference is quite stark. Relying on allocations in yearly budgets, subject to the political whims of lawmakers, is clearly a different animal altogether.
During renegotiation, sure Parliament can opt not to renew. But for the duration of the charter, the BBC has an uninterrupted period of collections beyond the fiscal year of the government, which cannot be raided to fund the new social program of the day.
Couldn't the Parliament negotiate with BBC to allow them funding of XY pounds per citizen. Amount to be transferred monthly from the taxes.
It would have the same effect. For the duration of the charter, BBC would be guaranteed funding without interference from the government. Only difference is method of collection and in my view, reduced cost of collection.
Wouldn’t be much of a Royal charter if the BBC became an Office of the Government.
If you are an agency which wishes to retain some modicum of control over your own destiny, then you most likely wish to retain some modicum of control over your sources of revenue.
Forcing people to pay a TV license means you need to send the bills to people, you need to enforce payment, you need to track payment, you need to sue people who do not pay.
All just so that you get an illusion of independence from political power.
At last from an American perspective, that seems like a technicality, and it uses government enforcement tools.
The US funds the Corporation for Public Broadcasting directly, and even under Trump, there wasn't much pressure around changing its funding--I guess defunding Sesame Street looks bad. Of course, public broadcast stations turn into panhandlers once every few months, so it's not without its faults.
For some definition of “wasn’t much pressure”. All four of Trump’s yearly budget requests zeroed out the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, though Congress wasn’t interested.
I agree that the licence fee is an anachronism and the BBC should have alternative funding instead, perhaps a ring-fenced budget paid from general taxation, but not because everyone has a TV.
Some people don't watch broadcast TV, and the BBC and its agents have been infamous for getting heavy-handed and harassing those who choose not to and who perfectly legitimately and legally do not have a TV licence. This is backed by a controversial law that criminalises the failure to have a licence if you do need one, which under any normal circumstances would only be a minor civil matter.
Meanwhile, today the BBC is very much a multimedia institution, but the licence fee remains tied specifically to broadcast television, a historical anomaly that could be fixed.
A different funding model that broke that link and removed the need for a separate licence fee could fix all of the problems with licence evasion and heavy-handed enforcement that have been a black mark on the BBC's history, as well as providing a fairer system where the public service is funded from public funds rather than singling out a particular group.
Im sure thats true. We had it the same way in Denmark, but have now changed it, to be payed for by taxes.. this had made it very political, and the budget is now decided by whatever party is in control, and the national tv/radio is becoming more and more of a coward because of it..
The idea is to make the poor and working classes pay for it, being regressive everyone pays the same, taxes are progressive, the more you earn the more you pay.
Government set the licence fee and legislation around it every 5 or 6 years. The last renewal put government appointed editors into the BBC in exchange for a change in Law from 'watch live BBC channels = you have to pay' to 'watch live non-BBC channels = you have to pay'. So now, even if you are just watching BBC competitors,you have to pay the BBC.. what a great business model.
I'm sure that is part of it, but I would love to see the breakdown of the costs.
When it was first introduced it made sense to have a fee, not many people had a TV so by collecting the fee, you didn't tax the people without it. But today everyone has it, so this no longer applies.
Independence argument has some merit, but I would expect that there can be different methods that would provide the same level of independence.
It's ironically gone from being a pretty progressive tax (only relatively well off people had TV's) to being a very regressive tax ("everyone" has TV's but you pay the same amount no matter how much you earn).
The independence argument has largely been destroyed by the government itself - the last few governments have tightened their control of the management of the BBC considerably to a point where budget control matters much less.
Independence went with the Hutton enquiry when Parliament set up the BBC trust to replace the BBC board of governors.
It gradually shifted from being an independent well staffed news organization that routinely held the government to account to an understaffed RT-like propaganda outfit and huffpost-like reprinter of press releases.
I've brought this argument forward many times since I moved to the UK, and everyone I've talked to hates the idea of turning the fee into a general tax. It's a weird refusal that I genuinely can't understand as someone not born here.
Everyone seems happy enough with the idea of paying tax for public libraries or parks or other social institutions they may never use because it benefits society, but bring up the tv license and it's like arguing with a brick wall.
1) concern about the neutrality of the BBC, esp. if you don't think they are currently neutral. It also might change the incentives of the BBC if funding is either guaranteed, or controlled by government.
2) the principle of general tax without strong reason. The government isn't trustable, they already privatised much of the railways. consent to general taxation give more power to government.
3) I don't have a television, and more people are choosing not to have one. There are shifts happening both wrt to media is consumed, as well as how laws are changing to adapt (e.g. requiring any device with a screen requiring a licence). Would be better for the situation to stabilise before deciding if a general tax is a good idea.
4) The whole TV-Van issue sours the issue. Public Libraries (AFAIK) don't send people after you for paying fees. The issue of censorship and management of publicly available information are also hot topics in libraries, but there is (arguably) a greater degree of "self serve" in a library, as opposed to planned/programmed broadcast - libraries don't generally create the majority of their content.
> Have you seen how much BBC bosses and stars are paid? Far higher than other public servants, so yes I would be against making it compulsory
It's not far higher than other public servants, and the Taxpayers Alliance are liars and fantasists.
It's like how they continually misrepresent the Prime Minster's salary as being in the low £100ks. It isn't. The Prime Minster's complete remuneration package is worth well over a million pounds a year.
I'm not sure it was meant to be a tax on the rich; It was initially introduced in 1923 to cover radio broadcasts, and widened to become the television license in 1946.
Also, the appeal of this funding model makes it independent of Governmental cuts and the politicisation of programming.
The license fee is fairer than a tax, because if you don't watch terrestrial television you don't have to fund it. For example, if you just watch Netflix, you don't need to pay for a license fee.
If the license fee were replaced with a tax I would end up paying more than the cost of a license fee for something I don't use - not keen.
You can apply for exemption [0] - needs to be reconfirmed every 2 years and sometimes more often if TVL/Capita thinks there 'might' have been changes you did not report (e.g. you subscribed to a service that participates in their reporting scheme - NowTV is one of the providers that reports their customers). You pay nothing if you qualify for one of the four exemption bases.
Note: if the exemption lapses without a new one in place (or a license purchase), they will actually send goons to 'investigate' after a short period.
The official word from TV Licensing is quite misleading (which admittedly is in their interest). You do not require any exemption nor to correspond with them at all.
Their "officers" are private individuals employed by a private company who have no special rights to enter your property. Absent a search warrant, it is almost certainly a mistake to allow them to enter your property.
Note that it's not a _legal_ exemption -- there's no requirement in law to register that you _don't_ have a TV, but they'd prefer you did so they can target their harassment more effectively.
I've given up telling them -- it's less effort to drop their letters in the bin, and appears no less effective at stopping new ones arriving. That was after being "visited" a few years back and the goon trying the classic "if you've nothing to hide".
I don't have a TV... But that's not the point, it's no longer relevant today as made apparent by their threatening letters that make it sound as though it's impossible to avoid paying them. What is relevant: I don't watch BBC, period. And yet every 2 years or every time I move I am threatened again for the offense of not wanting to watch the BBC.
I recognize that in the UK at one point this licensing model made sense due to combination of funding broadcast equipment, and the BBC has given a huge amount of value over the years - but I honestly think the quality of their content has decreased significantly since then, especially the documentaries. The licensing model no longer makes sense in a world where they are just one of multiple payed on demand services usually delivered over the internet for which we are already directly funding. It should be opt-in not opt-out.
I mean I wasn't against the licence fee until they invaded my privacy detecting the purchase of a new TV and started sending me threatening letters under the guise of "TV Licencing" which is a sub-brand they use to harass people to protect the image of the BBC.
They might feel personal but I'm fairly sure those letters are sent out blanket style. I've had 4 or 5 in the past and none have been addressed to me personally.
Until the repeal/replacement of Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1967 came through in 2013, the TV sellers were obliged by law to report any sale of TV equipment to anyone - and sooner or later the purchaser would get that impersonal note. [0]
Similar cooperation was since established with some streaming vendors (Now TV for sure, IIRC Sky as well...) as that change is pretty much what the 2013 changes were about.
Text of the notice would not be personalised, but it did use to come with _specific_ details from the purchase/account.
The whole thing is just horrible and leaves such a poor taste in the mouth. Threatening letters with "You are under investigation" in bright red capitals and 'inspectors' who heavily imply you need to let them in to look at your TV despite that not being a legal requirement. The BBC act like thugs.
It's contracted out to the same sort of scammy thugs as parking tickets. It's absolutely designed to seem (public) official and threatening, when it's nothing more than a private company saying 'please give me money'.
It's just somehow more organised into a whole industry than say shops chasing shoplifters (which is an actual crime vs. all the innocent/someone else's cock-up parking tickets people get).
I lived in the house 5 years and never received one, only showed up about a week after I ordered a new TV on Amazon and IIRC specifically mentioned the purchase.
Funnily enough I had actually been paying a licence for those 5 years but for the address I moved out of, cancelled it after that and never paid since. The fact the BBC pretends to be a kind of official legal authority under a different brand and actually sends bayliff style thugs around to juicier targets like shared student housing is disgusting, I'll never pay again.
Many people here are commenting on the fact that public broadcasters tend to do documentaries and educational programming which wouldn't be able to survive at that level of quality under a free market system, which seems to be a cause that almost everyone can get behind and an argument frequently being used for defending this system.
What riles me up personally: the ludicrous sums of money that these broadcasters pay for rights to broadcast the olympics and other major sports events. I really don't understand why I should be forced to give money to corrupt organizations like FIFA and the IOC to hold sports events that I don't watch and otherwise don't have a stake in, just because I happen to live in Germany, to make this stuff more affordable for other Germans.
Another thing that I find infuriating about the German system: You have to pay even if you don't watch and don't even own a television and even non-residential addresses and addresses used solely for business purposes have to pay. The only exception is that a home office within a residential premise doesn't have to pay twice. But in some cases you might actually have to. For example if you have a residential home and run a car repair shop out of your garage, then you have to pay a second set of fees for the shop on top of the fees that you already pay for the residential home, even if there is no programming ever being consumed in either of the two.
I also find the collection tactics highly questionable: When you register your business, they send you an invoice for paying that second set of fees for the business and never advise you of the home office exemption. It was only because of how infuriated I was that I did some legal research and then managed to claim the exemption after exchanging some letters with them. I bet most people don't do that and just pay up, which adds to the unfairness of the system.
I have two companies registered at my home address. In both cases I got, a coupe of weeks after incorporation, a letter with a form form the GEZ covering stuff like number of employees and so on. But having the same address, it was enough to provide them the registry number under which the residential fees were already paid. Than I got a letter confirming I don't have to pay any fees. That happened in 2019 and 2020, so it could have been different. The GEZ was known for some less than clean practices in the past. I never got directly an invoice from them so tight of the bat.
> I really don't understand why I should be forced to give money to corrupt organizations like FIFA and the IOC to hold sports events that I don't watch and otherwise don't have a stake in,
State media has to broadcast some content that's actually popular, that most people want to watch, otherwise they'd soon lose political support. I hate it too, but fact is that these events are extremely popular, especially among people watching a lot of live TV. So I think it's a necessary evil unfortunately.
I don't think its necessary at all. Why is it necessary? It's just something we have grown accustomed to in Europe, because of our big government way of doing things, where group A wants wealth transfers from group B, and if group A is a majority, they get their way.
There are a lot of things where that makes sense:
Group A, healthy and rich individuals, pay for health care for group B, sick individuals who can't afford health care. I'm on board because it would feel cruel and heartless to me to let them suffer.
Group A, rich people regardless of whether they have children, pay for the education of children from group B, poor people with children, so that all children regardless of their background get to have a good education. I'm on board because I think that everyone should have access to the opportunities that come with a good education.
Group A, everybody regardless of whether they use public roads, pay for road maintenance so that they can be used by group B, people who make a lot of use of public roads. I'm on board, because I think it would be bad for the country if it had regions that are only poorly accessible.
...in each of those cases, you can make counter-arguments. Those are just my opinions.
Group A, everybody regardless of whether they like football, pay for group B, people who do like football, so that they can watch football. Hold on a sec... What the... What did I just say? ...that makes no sense! Why would I be on board with that? Now, as a taxpayer-licensepayer I'm just paying so that other people can get the things they like. That's clearly going too far. I just don't understand how so many people in Europe are no longer even weirded out by this stuff.
State media does have some interesting trade offs for Europe specifically though. If a country doesn’t have that large of an addressable media market you might not get a lot of local language options without the state media.
BBC also does fantastic children's content including mobile games app's. Cbeebies is miles better then anything else. Also, you can trust young kids with the BBC. You know there is no targeted advertising, or in game purchases. Most shows are also educational (often secretly). Licence fee worth that alone for me.
Sometimes the kid's shows become hits with the adults too. I'm thinking of Horrible Histories - a brilliant, comedic look at history equally loved by kids and adults.
It is genuinely excellent and it just goes to show the power of marketing to children that parents feel obliged to put on any of the other children's channels.
The night garden is definitely trippy. For the occasions that I lose the battle and let my son have some tv before bed, cbeebies actually goes a great wind down job with the night garden.
If you think that's trippy, you should try turning on "Baby TV" around ~3am-5am or so. At least that was absolutely crazy when my son was a toddler and waking up at 4am. Soothing, but very, very trippy.
> The United Kingdom is somewhat unique in the world for requiring those households which view broadcast television to purchase a licence for the privilege.
I know at least three countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) which do the same (edit: according the Wikipedia [0], such a fee exists in basically every European country, Japan, Israel, South Korea and Namibia). In Germany, the situation changed a few years ago, every household has to pay now, even if they don't own a television or radio. When I was a freshman student 10 years ago, things were a little bit different: an inspector (the "GEZ man") came by my apartment a few months after I moved in. He wanted to have a look inside. I declined. He came back a few times, but I didn't open the door. I never paid the fee (and I didn't have to, because I received BAföG [1]). Even if I would have had to, there was just no way for them to prove I was actually owning a television. Here, those "detector vans" have been an urban legend for 60 years. I am pretty sure I read somewhere that they never existed and where basically "created" to fear people into paying the fees.
At least in the UK there is content on TV worthy of watching (I got addicted to snooker while there, also some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole"), also, when I moved overseas they paid back the licence fee for the remaining part of the year, no questions asked.
Now I'm in Austria and the "content" on TV channels is just ridiculous. Targeted at 70+ pensioners, but why should I pay for their entertainment...
BBC is awesome, their news is very good and they produce some of the best series in the world. It's a shame that they have split up BBC UK and BBC International so strictly and do everything they can to lock all BBC UK offerings to citizens of the UK. It infuriates me that I'm redirected from bbc.co.uk to bbc.com and are being displayed something else than people in the UK. If I go to bbc.co.uk, I do that to find out what Brits are seeing.
My girlfriend would gladly pay for being able to access BBC UK series, but that's apparently impossible. They've made some horrible contracts with BBC International that seem to prohibit that. It makes no sense that she has to resort to illegal streaming even though she'd love to be a paying customer.
Another problem is also that BBC International creates and distributes US productions that are far below their normal standards. So if you're looking for BBC nature documentaries, for instance, you have to manually sort out all those trashy international productions that are like National Geographic commercials. As I've said, it's a shame.
That's interesting what you have to say about international vs domestic documentaries. Could you give an example of either group?
I mean, I appreciate the BBC documentaries that I've seen for their high production quality and photography, innovative CGI and all, and I think they inspired and pushed the limits and budgets for TV documentaries worldwide. But personally, I prefer old-school quiet and scientific documentaries having extended interviews with leading scientist of a field and generally are about a scientific discourse rather than CGI-heavy interpretations of historic, cosmic, or paleo events; you know the kind where dinosaurs look up to an approaching meteorite in sorrow, or idk Alexander the Great is portrayed as a vulgar commander yelling at his men, with lots of made-up ethno kitsch and sensationalist commentary. But perhaps these latter ones are exactly the kind you're not so appreciative of.
"I prefer old-school quiet and scientific documentaries"
I do as well. The BBC actually produces a lot of these types of documentaries but they are probably not sold to broadcasters outside of the UK. I presume it's because they lack the big-budget, glossy look that is attractive to bigger audiences (and to international broadcasters). Or sometimes documentaries are trimmed or edited for international audiences. (I don't know if this is the BBC editing the programme or the broadcaster who bought the programme.)
A lot of the "old-school quiet" documentaries can be found on BBC4 - a specialised channel that shows programmes on specialised or niche topics.
Those old-school documentaries do not seem to be made much any more. I also prefer them but they are rare to find nowadays. Instead I go looking for lectures on the topic on Youtube instead. Or search for podcasts.
The production cost ratio is probably 1-100 or 1-1000, at least, between the old school, interview-an-expert type, and the dramatized CGI-heavy ones, so it is strange that so much money is put into production of documentaries with so little factual content value.
Unfortunately BBC news really isn't that good any more. It's been on a long slow decline since about 2005 or so, and now the majority of their news programming (with a few small but notable exceptions) are primarily cheering on the Tory government + ministers of the day.
It sometimes seems like each side of the UK political spectrum is convinced that the BBC is irrevocably biased in favour of their opponents. The Tory right want to hamstring the BBC ("Bunch of Bloody Communists" used to be the witty cry) and jump on it at any opportunity.
It seems impossible to imagine the BBC being truly unbiased when the government occassionally likes to show it has power over the organisation by sabre-rattling over continuing to allow the TV license fee. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/09/boris-johns...
Honestly I think it has a general pro-government-of-the-day-bias - as you say, 'used to be the witty cry', indeed! Under New Labour it was still broadly speaking pro-government (generally, it's never totally uncritical, just tending towards friendliness relative to the opposition of the day), it was just a different government with different values.
But people don't notice when something stops being biased against them if they've already stopped paying attention to it because they were previously put off by their perception of its bias, so many of these older perceptions of its bias still exist. This creates the illusion that there's bias both ways, based on people's claims, and that it therefore must be 'balanced'.
I agree with your general thesis. However, this line got me thinking:
>It seems impossible to imagine the BBC being truly unbiased
Thought example. If there was a truly objective, unbiased source of information about political and physical reality, wouldn't it be far too valuable to put in charge of a news desk. They should be running the government in place of the parliament and politicians!
Of course, if you find the idea somehow troubling, this is to demonstrate that unbiasedness is actually more difficult concept than is sometimes given credit for.
Ah, but that wouldn't be enough in a democracy because people might choose to vote against it given the right conditions. Your best bet in that case might be to communicate it to the voters in some sort of news programme - taking us back to square one!
But in all seriousness I do accept that unbiased outlets basically don't really exist and it is an impossibly high bar. The reason I talk about this in the way that I do is not as some kind of campaign against the BBC: on the contrary, I think public service broadcasting is in general a good thing and frequently produces higher quality content than the vast majority of privately owned outlets, at least in the UK, despite its biases.
It's just that to me, everything has a bias, and it's important to understand what any particular outlet's biases are before you start accepting information from it. I'd say this is the one redeeming feature of our print media, despite how much crap they often produce, they are at least usually very open about their biases.
You can get a lot of good information out of the BBC news and politics programmes, but I'd say you do have to use a fairly critical lens to get the most out of it.
It's not possible to be an unbiased news reporter. The only thing we can wish for is reporting that wears its bias on its sleeve.
What is this "unbiased" reporting anyway? It can only mean that I happen to share the bias.
Any reporter who thinks their work is unbiased is a reporter who is unaware of their bias; which is much more dangerous than a reporter who is biased, and doesn't care who knows it.
I agree with this sentiment considerably. The BBC seems to get equal bashing from both sides of the political spectrum. I think therefore it's likely it's doing quite well in terms of impartiality.
For a laugh and good demonstration of this point, check out the replies Laura Kuennsberg gets to any vaguely controversial tweet.
Usually a solid amount accusing her of towing the party line, being friends with Boris, Tory mouthpiece etc then another bunch accusing her of being an example of how the BBC is full of leftie communists who want to reverse brexit. Both equally vitriolic.
The way she draws the hate from both sides is impressive.
I'm a huge fan of the BBC but I couldn't help notice that during the last Scottish Independence Referendum there was definitely a bias - which I did conclude was simply a bias towards the current state of things.
I take this "both sides" argument as a sign that actually it's just bad - platforming the most extreme people from both sides in order to get the best fight, as if this was Jerry Springer without the chair throwing, rather than a sincere attempt to get at the truth of the matter.
There is no way that anyone with that level of donation to any political party can ever pretend that they or their organisation is "impartial". Being a Brexiteer just makes it even more ludicrous and guarantees that all the ongoing problems and losses of Brexit will be hidden by the state broadcaster.
I did agree with this sentiment for a long time but I have seen a shift towards failing to challenge conservative policies.
I'm also quite critical of the number of Conservative members that have been made controller. There is a bit too much of revolving door between tory communications and BBC at the minute.
Their programmes quite often suffer from both-sidesism. They'll have a senior scientist on debating a conspiracy-theory-believing anti-vaxxer, as if they're both on the same level.
While that's galling to see, it's targeted to convince the anti-vaxxer, or really the person who's on the fence. If they just dismiss the ideas, the anti-vaxxer says, "Oh look, the mainstream media covering up the truth again. Must be paid off by ${EVIL_BILLIONAIRE}." If he's given a chance, debates, and loses, that's a much better impression.
What's with this tendency to stick a binary label on every controversial issue? There are peer-reviewed valid concerns about these vaccines. Are the authors lumped into the anti-vaxxers category?
Regularly watching BBC World I've yet to see the both-sideism you describe. As if on the same level? Well in relation to another bete noir, you'll likely get to see an interview with Greta T. (zero academic qualifications) while waiting interminably to hear any (usually edited) counter-position from (for instance, there are many others) Richard Lindzen (with around 200 peer-reviewed papers in atmospheric climatology, MIT emeritus professor) or Judith Curry (https://curry.eas.gatech.edu/currycv.html).
BBC News has always been the de facto propaganda arm of the British government. It may only be apparent to you now, but their reporting has always been overly biased. Examples are any reporting on the Troubles (especially British crimes there), the Iraq war (especially the lead up and the Camp Stephen killings), and anything about Brexit.
Slightly odd then that one of the names for the BBC used by Brexit supporters was the "Brussels Broadcasting Company" because they thought it was far too pro-EU.
I expect that will be slowly expanded; the BBC's new Director-General wants to increase commercial revenue (and immediately before being appointed as DG he was the CEO of BBC Studios, the BBC's commercial subsidiary).
No, but it just raises valid questions regarding motivations. Civil servants are supposed to not be biased toward a particular political party. In practice, that may well not be the case, but questioning his appointment is fair enough. The Tory party has for many years attacked the BBC, using those attacks as a political tool. So people draw conclusions from the appointment of a prominent Tory donor to the post of DG.
BBC also sat on their 10 million hour archive of media while the internet, social networks, Wikipedia and blogs went ahead commenting, sharing, indexing, discussing and remixing other sources of content. They cared so much for their copyrights that their media became unconnected and unused.
The BBC and developed the web based on-demand video platform that inspired Netflix back in 2005 and operates the world's most visited news website. They did this despite having fixed funding, charter obligations not to advertise around their content and royalty obligations to producers.
> My girlfriend would gladly pay for being able to access BBC UK series, but that's apparently impossible.
There's the Britbox streaming service, but I have no idea whether it is international. Otherwise, there's limited amounts of BBC content on Netflix. But again, that may just be the UK version.
It's not international, and is jealously geo-blocked. As a Brit expat, I wish it was available. They are effectively refusing my custom, presumably because they can make more money from international licensing deals for terrestrial stations and higher-reach streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon.
They lock content away from UK users too, it's mostly made by third party, paid by UK public, and so it's locked from international use so those companies can sell rights abroad, and locked from UK users so they can buy the content again (despite paying for it already).
> Now I'm in Austria and the "content" on TV channels is just ridiculous.
small demography of 9MM, so the only way to differentiate themselves against bigger German channels is to produce content specifically for that niche. Shows in Austria/CH only value-add are a "local dialect" of actors, or setting the plot/story within Austria/CH. Other than that it's either a poor local copy of German shows (which are often copies of international shows).
Having been spoiled by British quality TV for a couple of decades I'd say the BBC is an incredible high yardstick, impossible to reach not just for Austria, but there is nothing like it in DACH.
One of my biggest annoyance by far is the dubbing of OC into German. They have only a handful of voice-over actors who they rotate for these jobs so the lead-act of every other movie has the same voice[0].
As a child I thought one of the reasons Eddie Murphy was so funny was because of his incredibly high-pitched voice[1]. Once people sit through the dubbed content most of the meaning and jokes are lost.
While other Europeans grow up watching things like Father Ted, Only Fools and Horses and such classics in their __original__ language, I have not 1 German-native friend who is able to follow English language on TV (even there are subs) and they will never get to appreciate other excellent shows like Norseman, Gomorrah, Suburra, because it's "too difficult to read the subs" and they didn't have to since they were kids.
[0] Dennis Schmidt-Foß has given voices to Ryan Reynolds, Chris Evans, Eddie Murphy and others. In fact the situation with E Murphy was so bad/ridiculous that they decided to give him a _new_ voice!! That's right the same person now has a different voice and nobody thinks that's odd.
Germany has a considerably larger population than the UK, and the German public broadcasters are equally terrible as the one in Austria.
Good series or programs produced by public television you can count on one hand. Literally.
Indeed, they also invest most of their money in entertaining old people. This may be due to the aging population, but I'd rather assume it's good old grifting.
Benefits Britain is C5, not BBC, so it's not funded by licence fees.
Indeed very few programmes appear to be made by the BBC.
It seems like what happened/happens is that producers form their own private company, do the work for the BBC but the public don't get to keep the benefit of the work paid for the benefit gets locked away to provide private gains.
Long running programmes are now made by third parties when they could easily be made by the BBC proper, Gardeners' Question Time, say.
In part is to serve 'talent', but BBC's remit is to fill the gaps where commercial programmes don't go, to be distinctive, so they should never be paying £millions for a talk show host.
If you're going to use public money then you should be benefiting the public as much as possible, not carefully twisting it to get private profits.
This is by notorious awful tv station Channel 5, and is not paid for by the license fee. (In fairness, it's not amongst their most terrible content; about half of their programming amounts to "Look! Poor people! Haha!", and despite the name this isn't really an example of that.)
Unfortunately the only demographic that really kept watching Austrian stations is pensioners, and sports fans (the amount of skiing tournaments on our main station in winter is ridiculous).
Everyone else often had cable or SAT, which gave you all the German and also Swiss networks, particularly the private ones, where the program is aimed at different demographics (also possible because of vastly larger pockets: German ad market >> Austrian ad market)
At least ORF tried to modernize its image, but do you want to lose your main demographic as well? Can you compete (financially) with German private TV and pay TV? Not to mention Netflix, Disney+, etc? There is not really a way out.
So were stuck with Skiing, Austrian Soccer, Tatort and Gaming show clones. At least there is a lot of cooperation/joint shopping with German and Swiss (public) stations.
The self-created German content could be worse though. Tatort can be quite nice, it is not aiming to be CSI - and that can be a good thing.
Back the day, before streaming was a thing, the benfit of Austrian TV was to whatch the same movies like on German private channels. Without any adds. Was quite nice. For obvous reasons, Austrian publc broadcasters lost there liscense in ermany one day. With the exception of the border regions, they cited technical reasons. Not living in a border region, I do rememeber that the Austrian news was quite good to get different perspective. Movies, as I said, were nice as well.
I do have to agree, so, that the home-grown entertainment sucks. In Germany as well. It is funny, so, that german public TV is not allowed to create their own streaming service and a lot of content has to removed from their online offerings after a certain period of time. Which kind of sucks. Especially since the rights catalogue of the public German networks, ARD and ZDF, used to be quite impressive. They just decidded to never show any of it before midnight, if at all.
This is the kind of TV program that I think has contributed to the UK's extreme stinginess and bureaucracy of benefits; in aggregate it's probably got people killed. Cherry-picking the most lurid stories to make people look bad.
It's also not a BBC show, it's by Channel 5!
I'm with a lot of people that the BBC can produce great stuff, but only when it remembers to be Reithian and the managers aren't looking. These days most of the BBC content I watch comes from BBC4, plus the output of David Attenborough.
(ORF produce exactly one show with an international reputation: the New Year's Day concert from Vienna, which is lovely)
> The show that highlights, amplifies and prioritises the voices of working class people by filming them being evicted?
Thank you for pointing this out. I don't know British TV well so I wrongly assumed it was another show, because it sounded like it. The show I originally thought OP was referring to is called 'Can't Pay? We'll Take it Away!'. It is bile. That is what my above comment is really responding to.
It's sad to see people actually laughing at others' misfortune such as this youtuber, who has made a compilation of 'Craziest Freakouts Ever!' with clips from 'Can't Pay? We'll Take it Away!': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0kO9TA96h4
While that may be what some people use "Can't pay, we'll take it away" for, the programme is presented in quite a sympathetic way.
Often the enforcement agents have empathy with the people they are enforcing against, particularly when it's clear that the person has a struggle that's no fault of their own. They're far less sympathetic to wealthier people who are just ignoring their responsibilities and trying to get away with it.
At least that's how I remember the show, I haven't actually watched broadcast TV for at least 2 years now.
> In Germany, the situation changed a few years ago, every household has to pay now, even if they don't own a television or radio.
This was literally the first piece of mail I got when I moved to Germany: a letter demanding I pay for the TV networks I don't watch. I didn't even own a TV by that point, nor would have understood much of what was being said! A German explained to me once that the forced payment by non-watchers is justified as it benefits society as a whole. I must say, I've now found some of the programming on the publicly funded TV stations is actually pretty good.
At that point, why don’t they just have the government fund the television networks from tax revenue rather than effectively levying a poll tax earmarked for broadcasters?
It's not good for the government to have too much direct control over state media. They executive branch should not be able to change the budget from year to year on their own, since they can "punish" state media if they don't say things the government likes. Using tax revenue would generally give the executive branch power to set or at least propose the budget.
When Norway recently moved to tax funding state media, I think they solved this by making it a completely separate dedicated tax. At least that's what was discussed, not sure about the details of the final implementation. So it can only be changed by a vote in parliament, which is more visible to the public, can take more time, and requires a majority of parties to agree on that specific change.
Any payment the government forces you to make is a tax, in my opinion. And I see no difference in the “government” forcing you to pay a TV license versus bundling it in tax revenue. As you wrote, the same government can just preclude that amount of tax revenue from being altered by the “executive branch”, if that is the goal.
But otherwise, the “government” can always alter the tv license fee, or the tax. It’s always under their control, and changing its label doesn’t do anything.
I really don’t see how one has anything to do with the other. In the US, PBS and NPR are funded through the general fund and they still have editorial independence. But maybe that’s because the US system has a stronger separation of the legislative and executive branches.
In Germany, the budget for public broadcasting is decided by a somewhat independent commission. Sounds good in theory, but after a few decades, public broadcasters now have a budget of more than 8 billion € per year. This is more than the revenue of all private TV stations combined.
As written down below: to prevent the government from controlling the public television which they easily could if that fee was just another expense in the yearly tax spending budget.
Norway recently switched from a system where you paid a set fee if you owned a TV to a system where you pay based on your income and it's part of your tax form. The reasoning behind the change was that basically everyone either has a TV or internet, and since the channels are available online, everyone has access.
Lines are blurry in Germany sometimes, sure. But outlets like the ARD, and a lesser extent ZDF (there are some legal differences between the two, including independance) are way more neutral regarding the ruling, or major, parties like, say, Fox News and the GOP. And they have been, regardless of government coalition. They still are as far as their pure news formats are concerned, much mre "just the facts" then anything else I ever saw in the US. Their more "opinion" heavy pieces are different, but still are far cry from opinion pieces in the US, e.g. Hannity or O'Donnel. And that by itself is a good thing.
Austrians public broadcasters, the ORF, are way better than that even. They mutineed against the attempt to install pulitical operatives at the head of the organisation. They even end interviews with gvernment secretaries if they don't get strsaight answers.
> ARD, and a lesser extent ZDF (there are some legal differences between the two, including independance) are way more neutral regarding the ruling, or major, parties like, say, Fox News and the GOP.
I could have used MSNBC and the Democrats. They have George W's former press secretary with her own show, so I'd say they are biased against the current GOP, less so against conservatives.
As far media and press is concerned, fact based and neutral is the strongest endorsement I can think of.
The german state TV is independent, neutral and does very good journalistic job. I don't know how on earth they could be criticised to be a propaganda outlet for the state. I personally know someone who works for the journalistic side of the state TV and I can assure you that he has all the journalistic freedom he needs.
That being said, i fell like the state TV is the opposite. Only neutral news, facts without much of an opinion. For me it's not enough to follow the news since I can't be an expert in everything. I need voices from a certain my political spectrum that write what they feel about laws and processes. Environmental activists commenting environmental laws etc. Thats why I read the newspaper additionally. It's certainly not unbiased, but still independent.
The lines are blurry, but we can see different cases.
A notable case in 2009 was the contract as Editor in Chief of Nikolaus Beendet, which wasn't extended since Roland Koch didn't want to and went up to the Constitutional Court, which ruled that there was too much political influence at ZDF, leading to changed oversight, which still is close.
TlRecent case is the "coalition crisis" in Saxony-Anhalt, where the parliament blocked the new rates.
But it's complicated as bodies need some form of democratic legitimation and with the "Sozialwahl" we have one failing experiment of doing extra elections, aside from parliament elections ... where nobody knows who the candidates are and what they do ...
Thanks for the edit. In Germany, the means are to put people leaning to certain parties in top positions. Or people with the right connections. As a result, the bavarian contribution, the BR, is not necessarly known for its liberal agenda. Others are more left leaning.
One other way is to have former press and spokes persons from a government taking up positions at the braodcasters. When the current (?) spokesman of Angela Merkal left as a news presenter from the ARD (or ZDF, to lazy to loo it up...),that was regarded as a braek from customs and more or less a no-no affecting the independance of these broadcasters.
TL;DR: Political parties, and not so much the "government", use soft power to influence these briadcasters. Quite often by having certain people selected for certain jobs.
No, if anything I'd say even less. Private broadcasting can be influenced by add customers, politics and so on. Public briadcasting more or less only by soft political influence. Which tends to balance itself out between parties anyway. So if anything, basic bias tends to be the best reflection of the current center I can think of.
Because the government is the one who gave them the authority to levy the fees from you and the people running the public broadcasters are all directly or indirectly politically connected to the major parties.
Which other independent private business can just straight up charge you without you signing up for their service beforehand?
In Germany and I guess, in most countries, the public broadcasters are basically low-key propaganda arms of the government. The whole separate tax thing is a intermediate smokescreen to give the public the illusion of independence.
It's not just any private business. Compare with social insurance fees that must also be paid, it is not something you can opt out of while being part of the society. The fact that it is not a state owned organization is a feature, not a bug.
In Germany specifically it is not a revolving door between public broadcasting and politics, and there is clearly journalistic pride in taking down corrupt politicians, so while it is always good to be suspicious of media calling it a propaganda arm is overstating it. Media isn't always neutral but privately financed isn't more neutral than others.
You're contradicting yourself. You say it's good that the TV tax is levied by the government like social insurance fees but instead of it going directly to the government like social insurance fees, it goes to an "independent" organization and that's the "feature"? LOL, what?!
Do you really think that money is no strings attached?
Ideally it would be and I guess that's the idea on paper but in practice, the public broadcasters almost never criticize the ruling coalition on the "don't bite the hand that feeds you" rule.
IIRC during the 2015 migrant crisis, no public debate was allowed on public TV over the decisions made to open the borders and the only opinion allowed on TV was that "it's good for everyone" with any argument against mass immigration (not immigrants themselves) heavily verboten.
Democracy requires an informed electorate and publicly funded broadcasters are a means to achieve that. The government must have as little control as possible over their funding to ensure their journalistic independence.
That's the guiding theory at resulted in most European countries having some variation of a public broadcaster funded by TV (formally radio) licences.
There are many implementation differences between countries and none of them are perfect but I would argue that those I'm familiar with serve their purpose.
Yes, that is indeed how things work. It is not part of the budget and the ruling coalition has no mandate to bargain with it. I believe most European countries have similar checks and balances in place. I do not understand what the contradiction is, but if there is one it must be widespread.
We pay for many things we can not use, roads where we don't live, schools we can not attend and health care for the opposite sex. That does not mean public funding is good in itself, only that the grey area between what is public and what is private is large and politicized and settled over time. I disagree with many of them but that is no reason to get counterfactual.
There was a loud public debate about the migration crisis, both at the time and for a long time afterwards. It is important to recognize these things even if we don't personally agree with the outcome. That's part of living in a democracy.
That's entirely dependent on the country and political culture. At the very least I can guaranty that in Britain, France and Germany public networks and new agencies are far more neutral and independent than private ones. And that's a result of political parties being unable to co-opt the administrative machinery of the government system. So they end up co-opting businessmen, who themselves control private media for influence.
In a well designed democracy nobody is strong enough for long enough to take over public media, the school system, the judiciary, the army etc.
That money has no strings attached, unless the amunt is about to be changed. An changes to the fee have to be agreed upon by both chambers, Bundestag and Bundesrat. The Bundesat, representing the individual states, means state parliaments have to agree first. That's the reason why the last fee increase fell through after one state feared backlash from the AfD leaning members of the CDU (Merkals party) and voted against it.
Once the fee is agreed upon, it cannot be changed either way with out every parliamnt agreeing to do so. The money cannot be held back by te "government" (we have coalitions, and those change regularly every 10 years or so). Neither can it be held back for state broadcasters (third programms) by the local governments or parliaments. Sounds pretty tempering free to me.
And the debate did happen in 2015, or didn't you see the same panel discussions I saw? It also happened in print and the public broacasters reported aboutthat debate in their news segments. The nature of these news segments being to report facts and not to debate.
It just turned out that only one party really opposed the opening of boarders, along with the right wings of the cnservative parties CDU and CSU. Thos are not the majority but rather a very very loud minority.
> An changes to the fee have to be agreed upon by both chambers, Bundestag and Bundesrat.
The federal government, and thus Bundestag and Bundesrat, have no say in the funding or operation of Germany's public broadcasters. The exception being Deutsche Welle which is not available in Germany and has an "external" audience.
The funding on operation of public broadcasters is instead determined by a compact between the 16 states.
Ah thanks for the clarification! I always had the impression it was the Bundesrat\Tag. The compact things confused me. But that makes this whole thing even more robust it seems.
The public broadcasters in Germany aren't propaganda arms of the government and are generally respected across political affiliation, except perhaps by the sort of folks that think AfD has the right approach. They may exhibit some editorial lean (https://www.dw.com/en/a-dual-broadcasting-system/a-435426), but from everything I've seen not even to the level that folks in the US complain about CNBC or Fox News.
Germany, in fact, comes in with one of the highest press freedom scores from Reporters without Borders:
National public Radio and the Public Broadcast Company in the US, in further illustration, hasn't been Donald Trump's megaphone.
Just generally, independent journalism is important and can be subverted whether the sources are public or private. Open pluralistic oversight is most important to maintaining balance and Germany seems to get it right, while also making sure the media can be accessible to any resident.
Seems a not-awful approach to trying to ensure a more-educated population, which is also good for a democracy.
> except perhaps by the sort of folks that think AfD has the right approach
Ah right, everyone that disagrees must be one of those people so their opinion doesn't matter.
> They may exhibit some editorial lean
More than "some".
> CNBC or Fox News
Those are corporations that noone is not forced to fund if you disagree with them.
> Just generally, independent journalism is important
Except you can't give certain organizations a unique monopoly to collect fees from everyone and then call it independent with a straight face.
Also, journalism is only a tiny part of german public TV channels. They also throw tons of money on sports broadcasting and game shows while promoting gambling. Add to that the insanity of having a local channel for every state. Even if you agree that public funded news is a good thing, the current setup is hardly an efficient way to accomplish that.
> Seems a not-awful approach to trying to ensure a more-educated population, which is also good for a democracy.
You can call it "education" if you want.
Finally, unlike taxes, the TV fee is not means tested in Germany meaning that if you have a low income and don't fall into the few groups that are excempt then it is a very real burden.
> Ah right, everyone that disagrees must be one of those people so their opinion doesn't matter.
> More than "some".
This sounds like disgruntled opinion over having to pay 18 EUR/month for something you don't watch.
Please feel free to put something more substantial behind your snappy retorts. The studies and research I've read indicates that the people mostly trust and appreciate the balance in German public broadcasting, and most disgruntled with public broadcasting in Germany are on the radical sides. The second bit is more universally supported by psychological research indicating that the average person wants to watch stuff that confirms their biases.
> Except you can't give certain organizations a unique monopoly to collect fees from everyone and then call it independent with a straight face.
You're perverting the meaning of monopoly here, I think. There's a publicly funded infrastructure for broadcast programming, as well as privately funded sources of programming. ZDF and ARD don't have exclusive right to broadcast in any market in Germany as far as I know?
The publicly funded infrastructure includes representative oversight mechanisms from political and community sources, which provide a far more robust mechanism for neutrality checking vs the programming decisions of a profit-motivated private organization.
> Finally, unlike taxes
Means testing is a fantastic point, I whole-heartedly agree that statutory funding structures like this shouldn't overburden any slice of the population.
>In Germany and I guess, in most countries, the public broadcasters are basically low-key propaganda arms of the government. The whole separate tax thing is a intermediate smokescreen to give the public the illusion of independence.
This claim elides the difference between e.g. the BBC or Deutsche Welle and RT. It would be naive to think that the BBC is wholly independent of politicians. But it would be equally naive to think that they're no better than a state propaganda outlet.
I can't speak to Germany, but I view the BBC as the voice of the Establishment. That's a subtly different thing from being the voice of the government of the day. That's why they look right-biased if you're looking at their news output, and left-biased if you're looking at their drama/comedy output: they're just reflecting the Established status quo.
Because the broadcasters need politicians and courts to confirm that the TV protection money is constitutional.
It is protection money: You haven't ordered any service and if you don't pay they'll make you pay and ruin your credit score in the process.
In the collection process they pretend to be a government institution to avoid going through local courts, which sometimes are against them.
EDIT: Also, I'm beginning to wonder why any criticism of the German government or especially state TV is being downvoted here. Civil servants have a lot of time ...
I think it is downvoted because it ignores the complete historical context of this system. It was put in place after WW2, and with a lot of things implemented in the German Verfassung, it drew curcial lessons from the Nazis rise to power and their way of ruling.
Broadcasting, as opposed to the 100% Nazi party controll of media before, was thus setup to be independetly funded and run. The ZDF, if memory serves well, is allowed to be more of a government policy outlet than the ARD and the third programms. The goal is to prevent media to become government controlled, with the added benefit of being independent from add revenue. And that principal is still pretty solid.
> The ZDF, if memory serves well, is allowed to be more of a government policy outlet than the ARD and the third programms.
This was the original intent: Adenauer wanted a federal public broadcaster to compete with ARD which he considered too critical of his government. The constitutional court shut that down as only the states have the right to set up public broadcasters with domestic transmissions (Deutsche Welle is focused externally). Today ZDF and ARD have the same legal framework, they are just organized differently.
The arguments you make are orthogonal to the discussion whether TV fees should be protection money or based on actual TV ownership.
The latter has been the status quo in Germany for the better part of time since WW2, and arguably people were less radicalized on both sides of the political spectrum than now.
It is when institutions get overtly greedy that people start to complain.
In the UK I'd say the answer is probably that you can't as easily divert funds to a private Tory owned business by simply adding TV licence costs to taxes.
IIRC it's Capita who collect the money and keep a remarkably high proportion of it. They're also employing people to lie and intimidate to try and get access to homes.
Sweden made the switch in 2019 I believe. It was the availability of computers and streaming that forced them to change things. Since people with computers could now watch the programming everything became more complicated.
I am talking about the fact that the ARD itself is the collective group of all regional broadcasters (look up the name) and any programme is produced either by one of the regional broadcasters or by the shared production company Degeto. And of course is also shown in the "thirds". Take "Rote Rosen" (with questionable quality) and you will see it is also shown on rbb, hr, NDR and MDR.
The organisational structure causes what you can watch where and I am arguing that garbage produced by the "Thirds" is not only dumped to Das Erste but shown elsewhere as well. You gave me the current programme, I gave you "Rote Rosen" but that did not convince you. Here is more: "Sturm der Liebe" shown on BR, hr, MDR, NDR and rbb, "Bristant" shown on MDR, "WaPo Bodensee" shown on SWR, hr, NDR and BR … that is not "pretty much nothing".
IIRC in Germany Netflix €14, Disney+ €7, Amazon Prime Video €6. And all 3 I can watch whenever I travel. The TV/Radio Tax is about €18!!! and I can only "enjoy" it in Germany!!! Not only that, the quality of programming quite bad, and to make it even worse, I am forced to pay for it when I don't even watch it. When I moved to Germany it just blown my mind.
Are you also complaining about other parts of societal funding that does not benefit everyone? You could argue about so many things that might not affect you directly (schools, police, roads, …) but at the end of the day you may also profit indirectly from those as well (more educated people, fewer crimes, proper goods distribution, …).
Schools? Police? Roads? Seriously? You gave probably the worst examples you could have. You only missed firemen and hospitals.
But even then, why so expensive? It is a lot of money. Germany has 80 million people, assuming 4 persons per house, that is 20 million homes times 18 times 12 is 4 billion euros per year to pay for shitty tv shows.
How could you possible live in Germany and not benefit in someway from the roads? And everyone pretty much relies on the existence of the police/hospitals, even if they rarely need their services.
A million miles from what is mostly a luxury good with lots of competition.
Most of their content is streamable worldwide. Exception being licensed content for which they only acquire the rights for streaming to Germany. Why would they buy worldwide licenses? Netflix and the others also don't do that – they only get licenses for the local market (of which they have much more of course), travelers are just a byproduct.
NRK, the national broadcaster in Norway, let you watch geo-licensed content anywhere in Europe if you are logged in and authenticated with BankId [1][2]. Which is very handy, as before I had to go via VPN which was ok but more of a faff.
You cannot access it from abroad. That is what I was told at least since I don't watch German TV. If what you say is right, I doubt, my bad. Still, I am forced to pay something that I have absolutely no use. Is like if I was forced to pay for slaughterhouses if I am vegan (I am not).
If every household has to pay then it makes sense to abolish the tax and to fund it through the general budget instead, not least if the argument is that this is something that benefits society as a whole.
Taxes are not free to manage and collect so this also provides cost savings.
We have this debate periodically in the UK. The argument against abolishing the TV licence is usually that a dedicated tax ensures a larger independence of the BBC, which is not "at the mercy" of the government for funding, but I think this is a rather weak argument because the government already ultimately decides the amount of the TV licence fee, which is a tax.
Edit following the "reactions": By the way, in the UK it is not allowed to criticise anything related to the BBC (and the NHS) as you can see. Is it the same in Germany? :(
Hm, at least in Austria and Germany the government cannot simply change the TV license fee "just because". Of course they ultimately can, but it is not that easy.
It still makes a huge difference if money is distributed through the hands of the government, or dedicated 1:1.
> It still makes a huge difference if money is distributed through the hands of the government, or dedicated 1:1.
Not really. You can make it mandatory government expense by law, so it is not controlled by the government and its change would require changing the law, which is similar to changing the TV fee (which is also limited by law).
This is a political issue and political issues are debated in Parliament in any case, and that includes the budget. It's no more easy to cut funding if it comes from the general budget rather than from a ring-fenced dedicated tax, and ultimately people will decide what they want when it's elections time (and I can tell you that the majority of people in the UK are very attached to the BBC). This applies for the UK but also I'm sure also for Germany and Austria.
IMHO, TV licences are anachronisms at this point (in the UK we still even have TV licence discounts for black and white TVs...) and it's right to at least debate if they are best suited well into the 21st century.
Oh, you haven't been following Austrian politics in the last 10 years it seems.
- Parties says x in elections, that doesn't mean they will do x.
- Some parties/politicians will use every possible way to force public stations to suit their needs - regardless of what people think. Most people will never know - they just consume TV, radio or tabloids and believe everything they hear/read.
- If you don't institutionalize independence, it is gone.
- People in Germany and even more so in Austria have no idea how valuable public stations are. In Austria in particular it is a growing trend to criticize and even ridicule public stations - and this sentiment was gladly picked up and fueled by populists. They regularly demand that ORF is defunded - simply because they cannot control their unfavorable reporting on them - and they would like to. They were in the last government and they put "their guys" in every possible position to ensure control. They are still there and undermining the principles from within, trying to slowly destroy the ORF as a whole - either from incompetence or malice, who knows?
there are a pretty way of saying your country have less income / business benefits tax, but then you fund your tv with a dedicated fee, your roads with tolls, your medical system with copays or private insurance... at the expense of having more inefficiencies and costs for the people having to manage those payments.
Those payments are also less regressive, as usually you pay the same regardless your income opposed to the income tax, so the system is less fair for the low class.
LMFTFY. A flat-rate tax is regressive, because poor people pay the same as rich people. A sales tax (such as VAT) is regressive, because poor people buy more stuff as a proportion of their income.
An income tax is progressive, because you pay more if you earn more.
Several people have claimed that the Beeb is some kind of "public good". I don't happen to agree; but if it's true, then clearly it should be paid for out of general taxation.
The funny thing is that as long as you render any kind of services on any level, they are inevitably to society, you're already benefitting it. Society has exploited your skill, and you have benefitted its members with your services, and for that you get paid.
Nobody owes "society" past that point, but it's extremely profitable in the West, specifically, to double tax people with guilt trips into having artificial indebtedness to "society".
> A German explained to me once that the forced payment by non-watchers is justified as it benefits society as a whole.
Do they really believe these things?
This is the Kool-Aid you have to drink as a society, in order not to go crazy when you pay for things you never use and benefit from.
If you ever move out, make sure to let them know, otherwise they will keep hunting you for ever.
As an Irish person, I firmly believe this. While our our public broadcaster, RTE, is far from perfect (and sometimes mediocre), they are financed / run at arms length from government.
They often run exposés on government mess ups and criticise their actions. On a more practical level, who else is going to make quality non sensationalist content specific to Ireland? One of the downsides of being a small native English speaking country is the onslaught of American (and to a lesser degree British) content that drowns anything local. It also drowns out most European content as people are not used to subtitled or dubbed content.
Having spent plenty of time in the USA, I can't fathom how a system with so many ads and skewed "news" could be better. Why would you trust an unelected private corporation with no motivation or mandate for transparency more than a non profit org that is at least in theory answerable to the people? If nothing else it provides a common reference to reality that allows a real conversation to happen. The lack of this has proven in the last few months to be a real problem.
Most people don't question paying for socialised defence, education, roads etc... many services they may not use personally on a daily basis, because they understand the value of having a cohesive society as a whole.
Problem is, BBC (and to a lesser extent RTE) are not these unbiased services simply presenting facts. Their staff have certain views on political issues and they present stories in a way that is biased to those views. They effectively tell their viewers the range of acceptable opinions they are supposed to have.
A lot of their entertainment shows are junk too and I do not see why they should be funded through a license fee - if there is a demand for them, they could be funded privately. The BBC website is full of tabloid-like news - that is unacceptable.
If we are to have publicly funded media, it should be boring, i.e. serious. Host 2-hour long in depth debates on highly controversial issues between the most prominent people that oppose each other, carefully moderated (arguably it would actually be better to do this in print rather than tv format). Do cultural shows that promote "high culture" that people otherwise might not have engaged with. Counter the natural tendencies to look up to sports and entertainment personalities with a focus on scientists and engineers.
The perpetual problem here is that while BBC is required to "be boring" in many respects, if it loses too many viewers its value is questioned. So they have an ongoing struggle that they're told off if they focus too much on doing things that is or becomes popular with commercial broadcasters, while at the same time they face threats of cuts in funding if they don't bring in the viewers.
I take your point 100%.
I also love TG4's style of programming, but the problem with your approach is that you will be accused of "elitism" and being "out of touch with ordinary people" . I agree that a lot of the content on RTE and even BBC is a bit gimmicky or even trashy, but it is a difficult balancing act. Economy of scale is a huge issue for Ireland. We could never hope to cover even what the BBC does. I feel the answer ia more funding, not less. As for news bias, I agree that it is somewhat biased, but it is at least a common starting point for a discussion, as everyone sees the same message at least. The bias is more nieve, being towards centre left "good Irish morals" than some sinister government plot...
I firmly believe this, especially in recent times. Those mandatory fees finance the "public" radio and TV stations, which have a set budget and can freely operate within the budget. They are not depending on advertisement revenue (they have a limited amount of that too) and are not working to create a profit. As a consequence, they do have a certain degree of independence and overall can afford into a lot of good quality content. Of course, they have their share of low quality content too, but overall they do offer an environment where good journalism still can happen. Meanwhile even the most reputable newspapers, which traditionally were a place for quality journalism, are struggling a lot and it is not clear how long they can afford to present quality content.
If a state wants to fund public radio and TV stations, it doesn't need to do it through a mandatory, regardless of use flat fee. I would argue that that is the worse possible way to do it:
* Increased bureaucracy (why not add a 0.1% to an existing tax?)
* Regressive taxation (you pay the same amount regardless of your income; if you used the income tax, you would distribute it more fairly)
* No market shaping (you could instead fund it with a tax on, say, TV ads for high-calories sodas, or whatever as a society you decide should not be forbidden but discouraged)
The point of having a fee vs. a tax is, that the government has no direct control of it. So they can't just adjust it at will. The fee is set for several years in advance and increased from time to time to adjust for inflation etc. But it is an independant entitiy deciding about this.
> So they can't just adjust it at will. The fee is set for several years in advance and increased from time to time to adjust for inflation etc.
What stops legislators from adjusting the fee at will? There’s legislation enacting the fee, defining the fee, enforcing the fee. Surely, there can be legislation to modify the fee and remove the fee. Same as any other tax.
No, the fee is not decided by the legislators. Of course they can remove the whole system or pass new laws for its mechanics, but the fee itself is not under direct government control. The effect is, that they can just sneakily shave off the budget by 10% for the next year like with budgets under government control. They would have to fundamentally change the system first, which would create a lot of opposition, as a result, so far no government hasn't done that.
Parliament can pass any law it wants. That's central to the system the UK has.
The BBC is dependent on a fee collected by the government, as regulated by laws the government has passed and the government enforces. Insisting it's not government funded is trying to invent a distinction where none exists.
I've always mostly known public funded radios to be actually quite critical of the current ruling party. I do not watch much televison but I would expect a similar behaviour.
Howerver I guess it depends on the country you're from.
A ssome else pinted out, by funding public braodcasting directly they can afford to be critical. Were the fundid by a tax, collected by the gevernment, and handed out by the government this independance goes right out of the window. One of the lessons Germany learned from the Nazi regime with government controlled media.
In Germany, the government has no direct control about the TV fees. There is a complex mechanism for deciding about increases, which involves independent entities. Especially, the government can't just cut the fees to influence the media.
In order to increase the fee for public braodcasters, not a tax (small bt crucial difference), both chambers of parliament have to agree. The bundestag is directly elected, the bundesrat represents the indivdual states. This means, in order to change the fee, every state and the bundestag have to agree. For the states, that means one single state not voting for a fee change prevent any fee change. Just happened, one state government feared backlash from the AfD and the right wing from the CDU (Merkels party) and voted against an increase.
So in order to change the fee, it is not just one govnment that can do something, but a grand total of 17 (federal plus 16 states). Usually they all agreed, but with different ruling coalitions in each state, this mix of left and right having to agree in itself prevents the public bradcasters from becoming a tool for government propaganda. They do represent the establishment, so. Populists hate this.
EDIT: To be really accurate, the legislative branch sets the fees, not the executive on. The legislative consists of two houses, Bundestag and Bundesrat. The Bundesrat is controlled by the state governments, which are composed of local arms of the parties present in the Bundestag (kind of like congress) and regional parties, mostly those state and federal governments are coalitions of multiple parties. It is the party line thing where it gets blurred between executive and legislative bodies.
EDIT: I fell for a common misconception, as an other user pointed out. It s not the Bundestag and Bundesrat deciding these fees, but rather a compact of the 16 states. The same states make up the Bundesrat, the compact is not the same body, so. Which further decreases the influence the federal executive, and even legaslative, branches have o public broadcasting.
> Do they really believe these things? This is the Kool-Aid you have to drink as a society, in order not to go crazy when you pay for things you never use and benefit from.
Do we believe that the "household-fee" serves the greater good? No, I'd say not really. It was, IMHO, public broadcasts solution to the icreasing number of people preferring streaming and the internet over traditional television. And more importantly the decreasing revenue.
Are these fees generally speaking a good thing? I'd say yes, because you get a non-add dependant news source. Is the implementation, especially in germany, perfect? Of course not. It still has a place, so.
EDIT: If you move, you declare you address change to the authorities anyway. Everything depending on your address, government-wise and some other stuff, is then done automatically. Not relevant here, but that includes ballots.
If it was just a news source it would have been fine, but it‘s not. The department that manages this tax alone has 900 employees. Then each of the two big channels has thousands of employees. How is that an efficiently run news source?
Did I say it is efficient? It pretty much is not. It is stil godd to have a news source that does not depend on add revenue, and by law they have to be neutral in Germany. In praxis, they are obviously not, and not all their news formats are good, neither is their entertainment. But for the society as a whole, they are important. And with everyone deriding their entertainment as being geared for the old, well, our older citzens have every right to whatch what they want and have someone develop content for them as well. It's not like I watch all the stuff amazon or Netflix are pushig out, and yet I pay for crap lke Tiger King and all these pseudo-true-crime sh*.
If I have an issue with publc braodcasting in germany, it's te sometimes blatant nespotism at higher positions, the abusively high salaries, especially when compared to private media outlets and the degree of party influence. Overall so, these public media outlets definetly have their place. They could be cheaper, so. But that ai't gonna happen anytime soon I guess.
You can add France and Japan to the list. In France, they don't go door to door, though, it's only a check box on some tax returns forms. In Japan they do come door to door. I've never heard about "detection vans" in either, though.
The worst part is the intercom systems which are standard in every home. Not only do you hear the doorbell and the knock, but they get to broadcast their face directly into your private space! (I have since disabled the camera / audio feed but it spooked me more than a few times!)
Yeah, this is the same as how it worked in UK (still works? I dunno). I didn't have a TV growing up, bought one when I was about 14 thinking I was being sneaky about it, address was taken when I was buying it and obviously some box got checked on some system somewhere and my parents got bombarded with letters.
> I am pretty sure I read somewhere that they never existed and where basically "created" to fear people into paying the fees.
We actually do have detector vans - they belonged to the RegTP, now Bundesnetzagentur, and are used to pinpoint pirate radios, malfunctioning equipment, and check if private point-to-point radios requiring licenses actually have licenses: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Telekommunik...
In 2019, the BNetzA was out in 4.700 cases of radio interference - mostly it was WiFi routers using bands that are not allowed in Germany, but there were also 1.200 cases where interference hit sensitive communications like police radio or airplane communications: https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/gadgets/bundesnetzagentur-be...
German public broadcasters in particular used to justify gross per-household fees by arguing free-to-air TV can be received by everyone, and pushed FTA DVB2 over antenna a couple years ago with spotty reception, and only in metropolitan areas, years ago. That argument is as comically out-of-date as it ever was, with CI/CAM devices (for SmartCard readers) being installed on every Smart TV and set-top box since the SD/DVB1 times. Even though they argue they act in accordance with the majority, they know quite well that they'd loose a large percentage of their audience out of inertia alone when they'd be doing the decent thing and require SmartCards for those who actually want to watch their TV programs which, as far as entertainment goes, is mostly bottom-of-the-barrel palliative-care crime series plus expensive programs for corrupt sports (the good stuff is mostly on radio IMO).
But public broadcasters also have expansive web/IP presence, and even use Facebook for public communication (ZDF), when in their news/opinion pieces they rant against social media LOL.
Public broadcasters today seem just to create a self-serving and self-referential media presence for politicians, in these times of Coronavirus more than ever. Tonight, they're going to push for even stronger measures including curfews (!) even though infections are going down; needless to say, without parliamentary participation. The whole thing is getting out of hands with irrationality fast right now.
IMO, YLE actually publishes pretty good content, watchable via streaming. Commercial channels are mostly full of shit. 163 €/year makes ~14 €/month, a fair price, if you accept that public broadcaster is a tolerable compromise.
I remember the old times when there were inspectors going from door to door, often ex cops. Legally you weren't obligated to open your door, but if you did, and they heard a voice of TV, an invoice did follow. It was just crazy system.
Which is absurd to pay for if you're a foreigner not speaking Finnish, as the public broadcaster basically offers no content in English other than (poorly) translated news.
YLE offers news in Finnish, Swedish, Finnish sign language, simple Finnish, English (https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/ doesn't look that poorly translated), Russian, Sámi and Karelian. Areena also has many English-language programs that are just subtitled into Finnish.
YLE also has some originally English content (and as we don't dub adult programs in Finland you can enjoy them too). For example the early seasons Game of Thrones were shown on YLE in Finland (this was before HBO Nordic existed)
Also, alledgely, using scanners to catch cheaters. Though I got a visit from a man checking for unlicensed TV sets once and he didn't have a scanner, just a long list of people that didn't have a TV license.
Yeah, it was some law iirc. Regarding being busted, i was zapping one day when the bell rang so i opened the door to the inspector with the remote in my hand and the TV blaring, THAT'D i call getting busted :D
Worth noting that the license fee is now paid as part of the regular tax payment. So the tax authority manages the collection, as opposed to previously when it was a separate agency.
I don't know whether these vans were ever used here in Germany to detect TV watchers which don't pay, but these vans certainly existed. Their official, and I do think main purpose, was to detect signals which could interfere with TV and radio reception coming from defective electric devices or even illegal transmission sources.
The law is such that the inspector can look into your home from public areas but you don't have to open your door to them or talk to them. They are unable to determine if you own any device which can be used to watch state TV. This is quite silly. People actually fear this and gladly pay up.
Yes, Switzerland also had roving vans with equipment with which they could detect a switched on TV. I know because I got caught about 40 years back and had to pay a fine. The person that came to the door could tell us exactly where the TV was in the living room. So, those vans - or something like it - did exist!
In the UK, you must pay if you are capable of receiving live TV, not only if you do receive live TV. Even if it was never switch on, a TV that is plugged into an aerial qualifies as meeting that requirement.
That is absolutely 1000000% not true. You only have to pay the TV Licence if you ever watch live TV, not if you merely have a televion set. I've never paid the fee because I don't watch live TV, ever, and when you go on the TV licence page to fill out the form why you don't need a licence, one of the options on the form is "I only use my TV for games consoles, netflix, dvd players etc".
So it's not some "clever hack" - the law specifically allows for not paying the licence fee if you own a TV set but don't watch live TV.
It's unhelpful to disagree with someone on a point of fact and to decline to provide a decent source. The result is that you've given the reader no reason to take your word over the other person's.
From what I can tell, your account of things is accurate. On the website [0][1][2] the requirements aren't concerned at all with what equipment you own or with how it's set up, only with the act of watching or recording live television broadcasts over any technology, including over the Internet. I imagine it still wouldn't hurt to disconnect your TV from the means to show live broadcasts, for the tiny off-chance things end up in court.
I think spuz's account may have been accurate in pre-Internet days, but this seems harder to verify.
Thanks for the clarification. It's possible that what I said used to be true but looks like it is no longer the case. It's also possible that in the pre-internet days, the fact that you had your TV connected to an aerial was used as strong circumstantial evidence that you actually watched live TV but it was never actually used as the sole basis to fine you.
> Live TV means any programme you watch or record as it’s being shown on TV or live on an online TV service.
I find the wording here fascinating. Is watching a live stream over the YouTube app on my TV 'live TV'? Is watching a UFC event on the UFC app? What about the website?
What is TV? Is a monitor? A monitor with an aerial? Video content transmitted over certain bands?
>I find the wording here fascinating. Is watching a live stream over the YouTube app on my TV 'live TV'? Is watching a UFC event on the UFC app? What about the website?
If it's broadcast simultaneously by other means (e.g. satellite, cable, terrestrial transmitter etc.) it counts as "live TV".
Yep, it technically does. If there is a live channel on Youtube showing say a football match, then yes, technically you have to pay a TV licence for watching it, since the same match is broadcast on a TV channel.
I don't think the policy is that ridiculous, it's just that it's one of these where certain edge cases like this one can be safely ignored. You will be tracked and found if you use the BBC iPlayer without having paid the licence, you will not be found out for watching some random live youtube channel. It's an imperfect rule for a complex world.
> If there is a live channel on Youtube showing say a football match, then yes, technically you have to pay a TV licence for watching it
Sky offer a streaming service in the UK called NowTV which includes live TV streaming of their channels, as well as Netflix-style on-demand streaming from their library. They're very upfront that a TV licence is needed if you wish you watch their live channels over NowTV, [0] but one is not required for on-demand streaming.
You're right except a few years ago the law was amended to include the licence requirement for watching anything on BBC iPlayer whether live or not. Other streaming services remain free.
I own a pile of antennas for ham radio, I own a bunch of TV tuners, because they're usable as software controlled ham radio receivers, I own a television, and I own a laptop that sometimes gets plugged into that television.
That might make me look pretty guilty, but my TV isn't connected to an antenna, and I don't watch broadcast TV.
The bar for evidence of a violation needs to be higher. It's possible to own all of the equipment without ever having violated the BBC's licensing rule.
You can have and use TV and not pay, so long as you can reasonably show you are not receiving live broadcasts (if it ever came to a warrant being issued). Not having it plugged into an aerial and the channel presets not tuned is considered proof enough.
I'd guess with more and more watching via the internet they probably have far more success catching people watch live broadcasts via IP addresses and ISP logs these days though.
> The United Kingdom is somewhat unique in the world for requiring those households which view broadcast television to purchase a licence for the privilege
Not really, we have that in Slovenia too.
In the past, you could avoid it by claiming you had no tv (and a grey-legal area of letting them verify). Then they expanded and added the "radio" part, where you paid less if you have a radio (and no tv), including car radio.
Then they added internet streaming, and expanded the definition of "tv" to "any device, capable of viewing streamed content" (pc, smartphone), so if you have a smartphone, you have to pay for tv, just because you have a device capable of watching a stream.
There have been many calls to just encrypt the over-the-air broadcasts, and create usernames and passwords for paying customers for streaming, but they prefer the "catch-all" definitions of "tv", so they can collect monthly subscriptions from pretty much every household in the country.
Our private tv stations are not much better... the most viewed one, did a nasty deal with the cable/iptv operators, wanting either a lot of money for their tv channels as a searate option, or less money if their tv stations are put into "basic"(=cheapest, smaller) cable packages, so they forced a price increase for every cable/iptv subscriber and there's no way to cancel just their channels.
I live in Europe now, and I'm fine with high taxation. But for heaven's sake, call a tax a tax.
There are so many little things, whether its TV licenses, overpriced interactions with the DNV equivalent, overpriced tolls that were promised to be eliminated. The list goes on.
Fortunately most European countries have an awesome statistics office that gives visibility into government wastage. Unfortunately, the the social democracies historically(?) stuffed their public sectors in lieu of full employment policies, and bureaucracy is an existential threat over here.
> I live in Europe now, and I'm fine with high taxation. But for heaven's sake, call a tax a tax.
The BBC is license-fee funded rather than tax funded so that (in theory at least) they don't have to rely directly on the government for funding - private citizens directly fund the corporation.
This goes some way to ensuring more independence, and fairer news output.
In reality, the government holds the BBC to ransom every eight years when the royal charter they operate under is re-written. There will always be claims of political bias on both sides.
That's not really 'fairer' in any absolute sense, and a tax needn't be a rate, nevermind one w.r.t. income, but it could be, or even progressive.
I'd probably argue 'fair' would be per usage, or per television. The latter would even be easier to implement - just slap a duty on sales as with alcohol and tobacco.
(Actually, that would be great, the defining characteristic would presumably be the presence of a tuner (or network in today's age?), so it would create a market for television-like panels without tuners or consequently without being 'smart', I'd hope.)
They were a real thing. When an old style TV amplifies the TV signal and feeds it to the CRT tube, it leaks a lot of the boosted signal. I think the rumour that the vans were a fake was probably because they only ever had a few and it was mostly a propaganda show, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
Intelligence agencies used receivers to snoop in on CRT computer monitor signals and could re-generate the display output, I remember watching a TV program where some electrical engineers built a home-grown version and demonstrated how it worked. It was only effective up to about a dozen metres IIRC with their setup, but theoretically could work at longer range with better hardware.
I remember chatting with friends about it because we were playing an espionage RPG at the time so of course we wanted our characters to have access to the tech.
They were fake. It would be extremely difficult on most streets and impossible in virtually all tower blocks to triangulate an exact location to a single house/flat.
And the design was ridiculous. A working detector doesn't need to look anything like an aerial stuck on top of a minivan.
And the only record of them being used in a prosecution is for optical detection of combined RGB. Plus some handwaving. Not RF.
So they were pretty much a psy-op.
It's relevant that the license fee collectors - who belong to Capita, one of those curious quasi-private-with-state-support companies that buzz around the British government like flies - rely almost entirely on self-incrimination for prosecutions.
Thank you. Just last year or so there was an article linked on HN that investigated on this. And it turned out to be all fake. There was some sort of prototype that actually worked, but the range was so limited and localization was not possible at all ... it simply wasn't practical for any use. As the funding was somewhat public and news picked up on that, the myth was spreading and they made these fake vans with scary antennas and went on their scare-/psy-ops. News picked up on that again and word quickly spread all around. IIRC there was even some exhibit linked in the article that had various builds of these fake-vans. Of course everything was only props. The real deal simply only existed in people's heads. Plus there isn't any working hardware from that era to be found nowadays anywhere anyway. As the conspiracy theory goes on, that's apparently because it was all destroyed by BBC after the act. If you ask those people about all the other countries that had this apparently going on about where the remains of the equipment are nowadays you get a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ at best.
So the linked articles in actual post office electrical engineering journals from the time, over several decades, including detailed calculations and implementation details were also fake?
Plus they managed to somehow infiltrate a fake freedom of information request detailing a BBC application for a warrant based on TV detection, and internal documents detailing the operation of the relevant department and its legal basis of operation, into the whatdotheyknow FOI requests archive?
It seems unlikely, especially for varied forms of evidence over such a long period.
>> When an old style TV amplifies the TV signal and feeds it to the CRT tube, it leaks a lot of the boosted signal. I think the rumour that the vans were a fake was probably because they only ever had a few and it was mostly a propaganda show, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.
Just because the technology exists, doesn't mean the BBC actually used it. For one thing, it would have been far cheaper to put out the word that the vans are on the streets and patrolling, than to actually buy them, equip them and staff them with trained personel that could operate the devices.
Alternatively, perhaps a few of those vans really did exist and the rest was smoke and mirrors- rumours, fake vans without any active technology, etc.
Note that the reason I'm finding this likely is that the TV Licensing people are known for using psychological warfare tactics. For instance, I don't watch TV [1] and yet I periodically receive threatening letters from the TV licensing authority telling me that if I'm found to watch TV without a license I'll be fined, etc. Clearly, they send those letters to all addresses in the UK that don't have a license, under the assumption that most addresses without a license actually need one and that by sending out threatening letters en masse they will scare some of those shirkers into compliance- regardless of how many people who don't actually watch TV they end up threatening in the process. I've also seen some really startling public campaigns with posters showing bullseyes on houses, creepy slogans about being watched and so on.
Their tactics are a veritable nuisance and their mass mailing campaigns may or may not have the effect they want, but they sure have the effect of bothering random, uninvolved people with threatening government spam.
_____________
[1] Er, well. I do occasionally watch TV shows, or rather clips thereof- on youtube. But that's not covered by the licensing. You need a license if you're watching TV programmes as they are being broadcast. So for example, I had a TV set for a few years that I used exclusively with a PS2 and I didn't need a license for it- but I'm pretty sure that if I had ever been visited by one of the TV licensing agents, I'd have been forced to pay anyway. How exactly do you prove that you have a TV set but don't watch TV? Most modern houses have aerial plugs - mine sure does. The only thing that really stopped me from connecting the TV set I had to the aerial was that I basically dislike TV. How do you prove that to an agent hell-bent on collecting?
I used to get the letters because I bought a TV for use as a monitor for video projects and I was stupid enough to give my address when asked to.
They're sent out on a cycle with a bit of randomness. It's quite fun to collect the set.
They stopped when I phoned the Bristol office and they asked how I'd feel if an inspector came over. I told them they were welcome any time, and the drive over would be a nice day out. [True]
I'm sure it's entirely feasible to build such a thing, but try to find a case prosecuted because of a detector van, or results used as evidence. It doesn't appear to have ever happened.
And where is the detector van union? Memorial service for the driver who crashed? Job postings?
The solution built in R&D (as far as the rumour goes) was much simpler. There were only a few channels (typically 4) and this would have been all analog broadcast. The much simpler signal that TVs "leak" is light.
So look at the pattern of changing colours through curtains, and compare to a TV in the van with something to diffuse the light over the top.
Of course, the even simpler approach is to tell people you can do this and just send around / threaten to send around random vans.
when i read that article years ago i went in to a huge rabbit hole about side-channel attacks. A lot of the information from that reading spree has stuck with me
Yeah, this reminded me of the dutch broadcastings association 1969's april fools joke. In which they said to have developed a device that detects "zwartkijkers" (blackwatchers), for use by mailmen [1].
Funny detail, the reporter asked "Can this devise detect all televisions?" to which the fake interviewee answered, "well if you wrap your set in aluminum foil no, but otherwise yes". The next day aluminum foil was sold out nation-wide.
I've done some work with Buckman Hardy in the UK, they developed and sold a handheld detector to the BBC. They're a legitimate engineering company, I doubt they would admit to being in on the gag if this was fake.
I don’t believe there has been a single conviction based upon evidence gathered by these vans. They’re like lie detector machines - useful only as a tool to get people to confess. Same with the inspectors, they’re private citizens with no legal authority to enter a property without permission. Their purpose is to cultivate fear of prosecution, not to recoup lost revenue.
> I don’t believe there has been a single conviction based upon evidence gathered by these vans
According to the article they were not intended for convictions but instead to get a search warrant and then gather evidence for a conviction.
So who knows how many convictions were started because of the vans. Though I agree that the fear factor probably did help more than the search warrants.
I believe the current theory is they simply look for light leakage. If they see a "flash - 200ms - flash - 400ms - flash - 350ms - flash" pattern leaking through your curtains precisely at the moment the same pattern occurs in a live broadcast they know you're watching.
There was another theory (spread by the media and by the half-denying-half-encouraging bbc) that the vans can detect iPlayer usage across WiFi by looking at the level of network traffic, and then to a range of IP addresses in an area intentionally changing the amount of data the app received up/down to see if network activity changed correspondingly.
It’s really all a big scare tactic though. The best way to detect iPlayer being used wrongly will be to see who registers for an account with an identifiable email address.
You say simply, but I think that's much more difficult than just detecting the presence of em noise conforming to a broadcast standard.
Anyone that's put an AM radio next to a CRT TV knows it emits em noise.
The CRT itself is, to over simplify, a high voltage capacitor. It's one of the most popular devices used to power hobbyist Tesla coils...
I don't know why everyone seems to think that just because TVs were "receive-only" devices, that they wouldn't emit any sort of easily detectable signal.
Also, when this enforcement began, broadcast was the only source of TV content, so the presence of a TV was generally proof of watching broadcasts. There wasn't really any need to prove the TV was tuned to any particular content.
Now, whether it is a practical, effective method of enforcement that was actually used is another matter.
Maybe poor phrasing on my part, but that's the prevalent theory I've seen for how they do it today. Various other methods of EM leakage might have worked in the past (unproven as far as I know), but modern televisions are so much better built that visible light leakage is believed to be the only effective detection method.
Here's my TV detection method: look at their windows and see if there's a light flickering pattern that looks like a TV (if behind curtains) or maybe you can see the TV
Yeah I thought it was just a scare tactic and something the licence 'enforcers' could say (i.e. 'our detector van says you have a tv') to try and catch people out.
They surely can't get too much of a return paying people to check up on only potential licence 'evaders' so investing in a fleet of actual vans with drivers and operators would further reduce any return.
Many but not all :) - Some buddies of mine used to live in a student flat in Bristol that overlooked the TV Licensing Authority offices. My friends watched them go about their business over the top of their unlicensed TV for 2.5 years.
I remember as recently as the mid 90s there were intimidating advertisements on UK tv about how tv license vans were going to find you and kick your doors down if you hadn't paid.
I had assumed it was complete scare tactics, I never once thought that they had existed in some previous era.
The technology is completely sound, MI5 invented the rough idea for hunting spies (Operation RAFTER), but whether it was widespread or not? Seems unlikely.
> The United Kingdom is somewhat unique in the world for requiring those households which view broadcast television to purchase a licence for the privilege.
This is actually pretty common and almost everywhere in Europe.
I will never stop being surprised by how little my fellow British people know about other countries.
The situation was (is) the same in Germany: There is a fee of about 20EUR/month per household in order to fund the public service broadcasting. And in the last century, these "TV detector vans" also have been a thing in Germany.
While the detecting technology can work in theory, it will perform poorly in practice. Think of any dense settling, such as apartment blocks. It will be kind of impossible to determine the exact source of radio signals from the street, at least in the frequency domain and signal strength in question.
They had fee collectors in Germany in the 90s. When I was at university it was common knowledge that you do not have to let them in if they come to your home. A friend's roommate let them in anyways, which cost him 400 DM (that would now be about 500€).
I assume the 500 Euro includes inflation, doesn't it? Oherwise, I have to agree, back the day you didn't have to let these guys in. You didn't, you were save. Just another reason why the switched to a household fee. Regarding that so, not having a TV cable connection at our home, we do watch German public TV through their apps for Fire TV, so not oaying the fee and still wtching would be kind of using "alternative" streaming services, which I did too before Amazon prime and Netflix came about.
In the late 90's I went for an interview at a Sony store in London. At the start of the interview the store manager told me that he had been busy preparing the shop's regular report of addresses of everyone who had purchased a new TV for TV licensing. I imagine these were then cross-referenced against who had a TV license for potential follow-up. I struggle to see how the idea of TV detector vans were more than 'enforcement theatre', although possibly a cheap and effective strategy in the past.
Israel had similar fee for many years. (The public television was deeply inspired by the bbc).
But here they solved it by a much easier way.
* once you got married, you were automatically assumed to have a TV set.
* any tv that was sold were reported to the communication ministry.
* a car owner would pay by default. Assumption was all cars would have and use a radio.
* to show you don’t have a TV set or it’s not receiving any over-the-air broadcasts you were suppose to wait for random check ups. Once finally someone came, they can decide if you don’t need to pay.
But the most interesting story any Israeli know is the “mehikon” (Eraser in Hebrew) and its counterpart (anti-mehikon).
Back in the days, the countrie’s manifest at least was socialism. It wasn’t “fair” someone would have a color tv while others can’t. So the communication ministry required the broadcasters to wipe colors. So even color tv was shown as b&w.
in order to “fix” that, The anti-mehikon was made. A device to “restore” the faulty tv signal and get the colors back.
People suddenly had to pay licenses for at least 7 years with fines and interest that shot up the "price" by a 1000%
The public television involved lawyers as collection agencies and threatened people with writ of execution.
Thank you for "mehikon" reference. It sounds as something out of a bad soviet joke.
Your point about random checkups is probably how it was done in most countries. You could opt out, but you would have to allow them to enter your home for a checkup. If you refused, you would have to pay again.
Legend goes that back in the 80's DR (the Danish "version" of BBC) would buy ads on top of taxis, placing a funny looking widget and text on the side saying "This is a TV detector van" to scare people into registering for paying their TV license.
According to the story, DR never had the technology (or new it existed) to do an actual TV detection.
I heard the story from an old interview from a retired DR manager, who said that they did this. So source wise it is pretty weak, but still a funny story none-the-less.
In 1969 the Dutch Television broadcasters did an April fools joke, they said they could detect people that did not pay for watching TV (zwartkijkers) by driving around with a detector [0]. It could be blocked by wrapping your TV in aluminum foil. The next day aluminum foil was sold out in many places...
In Germany, the GEZ (Gebühreneinzugszentrale, which roughly translates as "subscription fee collection agency") also had some of these infamous vans with parabolic dishes on them that allegedly could detect TVs in homes or offices. I never believed this but found it funny to which lengths they would go to get people to pay the public subscription fees for their TVs.
Until the mid 2000's they also hired free agents that were paid a commission for every "black sheep" they got to register. Of course these people regularly overstepped their mandate and found creative ways to intrude people's homes, some would e.g. pose as TV technicians and ask if they could have a look at the cable as the neighbors reported some problems, only to reveal themselves as the GEZ guy once they were inside and saw the unregistered TV set. Of course all of that was illegal, and in 2007 (I think) the system was finally changed so that a given household would pay a fixed fee instead of a fee that depended on the number of receiving devices they had, which made using the "collection mafia" unnecessary. Still, the GEZ is by far the most hated agency in Germany and the subscription fees (around 18.5 € / month) are among the most hated taxes people pay. Some people go as far as voting for an ultra right-wing party (AfD) only because they promise to do away with this fee should they come into power. Personally I don't mind paying for it, though I'd prefer to be able to pay more selectively for services I use. Then again, less than 20 € / month in additional tax for a single household isn't anything to really get worked up over.
Given the sad state of journalism across the big pond (actually pretty much everywhere for various reasons), I'm glad there's such a system in place (and that there is a large viewership in the first place!).
Quality has its price, though I agree, maybe one should be able to pay more selectively for journalism and less for football licenses. But don't change a running system...
You don't have to understand Dutch to understand what the doorbell and the "uhooo" at the end of the commercial means... The whole text of the commercial is a hilarious attempt at intimidation. Basically it's about how it's all fun and games until somebody gets busted.
Ireland also requires a TV license for each home. If you have any device _capable_ of receiving a signal you're required to pay.... even if you only use the TV for games consoles or Netflix.
Same in Germany, or at least it used to be that way and somewhat recently they just got rid of the requirement to have a TV.
It's just yet another tax. Moving to Germany feels a bit like they pretend to keep "tax rates" low by splitting out various things and making it "not a tax". In the Netherlands I had income tax and that was it, from that the govt just pays development aid and old age money (AOW) as needed. Here, you have church tax (if your parents signed you up for that party), new states support, broadcast fee, pension contribution, and probably more I'm forgetting.
While these things feel like taxes they are not because they are not managed by the government. Taxes (no matter their labelled purpose) are pooled and spent according to the yearly budget. Other fees collected by an agency are spent just for that purpose maybe propped up by money from the tax pool. Besides budgetary reasons, having a separate TV fee prevents (in theory) the government from interfering with the public media as there is no direct dependency.
The fee not being a tax in Germany is an important distinction for a very basic reason: The government has no direct control over it. The whole reason for the public TV and radio to exist is to create independent media, especially also independent from the state. So while the government is involved as far as it guarantees the system, it has no further control about it. So the government can't threaten to cut funds, just because they don't like critical reporting. And guess what, the right wing extremists are constantly asking for the end of that system.
I’ve also seen this done on fines; it seems the fine is set by legal statute but, (and it’s just an impression), they get around this here in California by tacking on court fees, etc..
The UK only requires you to have a TV licence if you watch BBC iPlayer, or watch any live TV / stream, even if that content is not produced by the BBC. Also, recording something live in order to watch it later requires a TV licence.
So, if you watch something live on Amazon Prime or YouTube, you need a TV licence. I don't know if the BBC define what 'live' actually means, there's always a delay.
I have a TV but don't have a TV licence. I don't own an aerial cable and it's been factory reset to detune all the channels (I used live in a house that had a TV licence). I use it with a Chromecast.
I have one of the 'threatening letters' next to me right now. They're all addressed to 'The Legal Occupier'. That's not my name. They can go **** themselves.
Maybe that's one reason some TV manufactures have started removing OTA tuners. My Visio is not actually labeled as a Television, I believe it's a home theater display, because it has no TV tuner.
It might. But currently you pay the license fee each year, and it's one license per household. So if it gets bundled in the price of the receiver then you're changing the price model - now if you buy a TV for a spare room you're paying the license fee again, and if you replace your TV earlier than the average you lose out, if you keep your TV for longer than average you win.
I expect it could be made to work, but I have no doubt people would complain about it. And the license fee is not a pure private contract - there is government involvement (hence all the political arguing about whether the BBC should be allowed to increase the fee or get rid of the exemption for senior citizens). So if there's a big change that lots of people complain about then it might be blocked for political reasons even if it actually makes sense over all.
If you share a flat with other people this exact same thing happens. In the german form, at least, you can specify that somebody is already paying for that flat (and you put their details) and they will stop asking.
You’d just buy the TV from the north of Ireland did it that way. If U.K. did it that way you’d buy it in the south. In Ireland you could also buy from the rest of the EU.
When you bought a new TV or video recorder then you used to have to supply your name and address. The selling business had to provide that info to the TV Licensing body by law. This was the mid-90s so it might have changed.
I remember paying 300 quid for a VCR and giving them a fake name and address before leaving with my JVC under my arm.
Only for one time fees, most TV Licenses style taxes are recurring. If you try to base it off an 'expected lifetime' you're just guessing how often people will replace the TV and either get under or over charged based on how long they keep devices.
Perhaps you could make it mandatory for a voucher good for 1 year of license to be sold alongside every TV. You can then credit that voucher to your household account.
(If you bought more than one new TV per year, your TV license account would be in perpetual credit. I don't see that as a problem.)
That's just a tax with extra steps of dealing with the voucher. The average replacement timespan is 7-8 years so what's the point of including it in the first year?
I haven't seen one here for years but I always assumed they were a fake-out! There are definitely criminal penalties to not paying, but mostly it's done by sending threatening letters for addresses that don't have licenses, and visiting as a last resort.
I heard in Japan there isn't any penalty for not paying, and I was captivated by a Murakami story of the "NHK man" who raps loudly on apartment doors and can only yell at these closed doors trying to shame non-payers.
"Television license fees" are a peculiar concept if you've not lived in a country that requires them, but as another commenter pointed out, several countries, mainly in Europe but outside as well, have this "system" in place.
Quite frankly it's ridiculous - imagine needing to pay a "fee" to CNN/Fox News/NYTimes/Yahoo/whatever-well-connected dotcom just because you have an internet connection and web browser.
> Quite frankly it's ridiculous - imagine needing to pay a "fee" to CNN/Fox News/NYTimes/Yahoo just because you have a internet connection and web browser.
This comparison is ridiculous. The license fee is a little outdated in certain aspects but it covers more than just broadcast news as the orgs you mentioned do.
The BBC has a broad remit to inform, educate, and entertain. Not in itself radically different to a lot of other broadcasters, and typical for a public service broadcaster, but the universal license fee is a key differentiator.
In requiring everyone with a television to contribute, the BBC has a duty to serve the entire population of a country, regardless of their income or demographic. This enables the BBC to produce content that may not be commercially viable for privately funded broadcasters that in term can serve communities that would otherwise be overlooked. BBC's Three and Four channels tend to best exemplify this aspect with content that can often be slightly niche and, in the case of Three, regularly have casts and production crews that are far more diverse than the industry averages.
The license fee is also independent of the state budget. The Government does have the power and oversight to adjust funding every 5-11 years, but the royal charter ensures that funding is separate from typical taxation and avoids the Treasury. This also ensures (in theory) that there is more autonomy for accurate, fair, and unbiased news reporting.
The BBC has also for most of its existence operated and maintained a lot of shared broadcasting infrastructure (which admittedly is less key as viewing moves away from terrestrial broadcast and towards IP services, and to a lesser extent cable and satellite). In the previous charter they also had a responsibility to improve broadband infrastructure in rural areas.
There's also a final aspect to this in that the BBC performs a lot of public service open research into emerging technologies as well as the social impact of them and different forms of media. Most media organisations don't care about anything other than how much of a person's attention they can capture at the expense of everything else. More eyes on a media org = more advertising sold. The BBC's model means they can actually give consideration to what healthy consumption is and how to promote digital wellbeing etc., as well as ensuring younger audiences are better catered for (there's a great article on how YouTube Kids has severely let down its young audiences in the past here: https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in... )
While you're certainly correct about the ideals of the BBC, there are enough people who have decidedly stopped consuming their content, either because of the terrible decline in quality (I stopped reading BBCNews because of the clickbait years ago), or preference not to consume it in general. Mandatory license fees, and any enforcement to collect as such, is therefore completely ridiculous in this day and age.
I'm not sure using CNN and Fox News as examples of how the system should work is a great counterpoint. The US has a massive problem with terrible quality TV and web news sources. The licence fee system at least attempts to create an alternative to that.
I remember when I was doing my engineering degree asking my Electrical Engineering lecturer if he thought they could tell the difference between black and white and colour TVs. He thought not, which saved me a few quid.
Also worth noting that there is a campaign in the UK to get non-payment of license fees decriminalised and made into a civil offence.
"In 2017 (latest data available), 72 per cent of all prosecutions for TV licence-fee evasion were against women.
This figure is so high that licence-fee evasion accounted for 30 per cent of all prosecutions against women, the single most common charge."
Not read the article, but as a political aside, the licence fee is a big subject of debate here at the moment.
It was designed so that the BBC essentially had independence from the government, and as such, they could more easily be politically neutral (if they were funded directly by the government, there would be more pressure for them to cover the government favourably in news programs etc.).
Problem is that these days the licence fee is outdated with lots of people just watching Netflix/Amazon etc.
A lot of the "right wing" here also think the BBC has a left wing bias, which I think is a bit ridiculous really, as a lot of the "left wing" also think it has a right wing bias. But the consequence of this is that a lot in the current government want to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee. This would basically mean that there is no consequence to not paying the licence fee, and assuming the government didn't come up with an alternative way of funding it, it would amount to death by a thousand cuts for the BBC (which a lot of right wingers are actually quite open about wanting).
It's quite a tough problem in my opinion. Direct funding from the government would solve a lot of problems, but also make political impartiality a lot more difficult to achieve. A direct subscription like for Netflix would likely result in a significant drop in revenue.
The BBC would face significant cuts if that was the case. It would likely end up at a point where the quantity and quality of content was reduced due to less revenue, which then would cause additional people to cancel subscriptions.
This would be quite damaging for the UK as the BBC is a great way of projecting soft power, plus it provides quite a lot of great resources (as has been pointed out in other comments).
I'd be more in favour of a system like Germany has to be honest.
So I should pay the license fee to keep the quality of content I don't watch high? If the BBC's value proposition is so good, it will have no issue convincing the public of that.
You could hold a similar debate on every service the government currently provides, and you would essentially end up with toll roads everywhere and parents having to pay exorbitant amounts to educate their children properly.
The BBC is similar to these things in the sense that it provides good value for the taxpayer, and contributes quite significantly to society (even if it doesn't directly effect you in the sense of you consuming their content regularly).
Imagine that the police force had robots that took pictures through your windows and then employed sophisticated object recognition and semantic inference engines to determine what is happening inside, matching it agains a database of known crimes. Then explain to me how that's different from the police officer who looks through your window to establish probable cause for a "search warrant".
If your society is principled enough to require warrants to execute "searches", then it should be principled enough to recognize that this principle, by default, excludes any activity which has no measurable impact on society from criminalization.
The first piece of evidence in any investigation should come without a search.
Heh, as late as a decade ago in South Africa the national broadcaster used to air scary ads implying these vans roamed the neighborhood and would catch you out.
Nobody bought it and they went back to politely pleading with people to pay their TV licenses.
In 1969 the national TV news broadcast in the Netherlands reported that inspectors would be driving through the streets to catch people who hadn't paid their license fee. "Surely people won't be wrapping their tvs in aluminium foil. So we'll catch them!" Aluminium foil was sold out the next day. The date was april 1st.
I haven't seen a marked TV detector van for for over 25 years. I'd kind of assumed that digitisation of the TV licence records some time before that, as as well as migration away from CRTs, meant that sending reminders/demands was simply more effective.
And I'm really not sure I believe that they correlate room light fluctuations with broadcast programming, or even that this is technically/economically feasible. Sounds more like disinformation to me.
>The United Kingdom is somewhat unique in the world for requiring those households which view broadcast television to purchase a licence for the privilege.
If we ignore the distinction between a license and a tax, France still levies a TV tax. I believe other European countries do this as well. The van is the unusual part, not the license fee.
With Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, YouTube, etc. the BBC have a hard time justifying the license these days. The only exception would be live sporting events, which is something I don't watch. Given I only watch about 1 hour of "TV" a day I was very glad to stop my license last year. It will not be missed.
It's called a 'TV licence' but know that it also pays for all your radio. I don't watch much TV but I do listen to a lot of radio every day, like many British people.
I've not listened to the radio in 10+ years - my audio consumption is all from Podcasts, which IMHO blows any radio out of the water. It's not live but I don't need it to be.
> Podcasts, which IMHO blows any radio out of the water
Can you please share which breathtaking podcasts you're listening to, because I've never found anything even close to as good as landmark BBC radio shows like Today, PM, Today in Parliament, In Our Time, The Moral Maze, Blood, Sex, and Money, From Our Own Correspondent, The Essay, and Night Tracks.
I listen to In Our Time as a podcast :-) It's actually better than the radio-broadcast version because it includes 10-15 minutes of extra time with the guests where they have a bit more discussion.
'Today' is tabloid bilge and has played a big part in the dumbing down of political discourse in the UK. It's hard to take any of the rest of your recommendations seriously when they start with Today.
Certainly there are other BBC programs that are better, and a small number that are very good, but at this point I honestly don't think they are enough to make up for how awful BBC News is and how much damage it's doing to UK society. In the past I would have made excuses for the regressive way the BBC is funded, but it's really hard to do that now.
No idea what any of those shows you listed are. My interests are science, history, computing, polictics - and there are numerous podcasts covering these subjects. To name just a few in case anyone is intersted:
* Dan Snow's History Hits
* Triggernometry
* Lex Fridman Podcast
* Atomic Hobo
* Jason Scott Talks his way out of it
* Darknet Diaries
* Omega Tau
* Rob Reid After On
* Anatomy of Next
* page 94 - Private Eye Podcast
* Command line heroes
* Full Fact
* Guido Talks
* Dan Carlin's Hardcore History
* The Bellingcat Podcast
* On The Metal
Some of these podcasts have won awards (See Bellingcat, Page94). My point being that given the shear number of high-quality content out there, I felt it wasn't worth paying £120 to the BBC every year.
> No idea what any of those shows you listed are ... My interests are science, history, computing, polictics
Well I don't know what to say apart from that absolutely astounds me. They're the background noise of many British homes and you're severely missing out if these are your interests.
For example, In Our Time alone is 900 45-minute episodes each about an individual topic of science, history, maths, politics, art, culture, religion, etc, sometimes even computing, with genuine experts coming to discuss and debate it starting with a basic introduction anyone can follow and then going into the details.
I think literally nobody else in the world produces this kind of super-high-quality and enduring intelligent spoken-word content. Even the NPR in the US is very poor in comparison.
And have you really never heard of the Today Programme or are you exaggerating for effect? It really sets the national daily political agenda in the UK like nothing else. I can't practically understand how you can follow politics and never had heard anyone say 'they said on the Today Programme...'
> I felt it wasn't worth paying £120 to the BBC every year
In Our Time does indeed sound very good - I'll have to check it out - thanks.
> And have you really never heard of the Today Programme or are you exaggerating for effect?
I've heard of it - never seen an episode so couldn't say what it was about (although the name probably gives it away). Traditionally I've not really watched much "broadcast" TV, even as a kid. I spent most my childhood in front of a computer...
> No idea what any of those shows you listed are. My interests are ..., politics
_Today_ and _PM_ are amongst the most influential media in the UK. Not knowing about them is almost wilfully ignorant -- other media will report that "on the _Today_ programme this morning, Minister for Vaccines, Nadhim Zahawi, said…"
Like I said elsewhere, I don't watch much broadcast TV, honestly have better things to do with my time. I've been successful in life so I don't see why you are insisting I need to watch this show.
I get my news and current affairs elsewhere.
Edit: I'd also like to add that no one in my circle has ever asked me "hey did you see that thing on the Today Programme last night?". In fact very little conversation about TV programmes in general. Rather conversation involves "have you watched xyz on Netflix yet". Perhaps this is a generations thing? (I'm 40.)
> Like I said elsewhere, I don't watch much broadcast TV
Today is a radio programme - this whole thread is about radio. So you won't 'see' anyone on it and it wasn't ever on 'last night'.
> In fact very little conversation about TV programmes in general.
Again... it's a radio programme. And I'd bet my life on the fact that whatever political media you consume actually does frequently has conversations about what happened on the Today programme.
> honestly have better things to do with my time
I think you're thinking it's an evening chat show? Today is essentially the nation’s daily standup, and it's in the morning. You’ll usually get a robust interview with a couple of ministers and often the Prime Minister. It’s a major way we have to interact with the Government daily. The Today programme will often be a primary source for whatever secondary source political media you are using.
I am not insisting you listen to it. I don't listen to it; I prefer to read news rather than listen or watch it.
I do expect anyone who lives in the UK to be aware it exists, including people 10 years older than me.
> An almost comedic interview on the Today Programme this morning had Home Secretary Priti Patel attempting to defend the Government’s new rules on ‘mingling’ ...
I think the point people are making is that much of the news you read will be a summary of what happened on Today that morning. That’s where a lot of political interviews happen, for example.
Lots of political live blogs etc just repeat it. That does of course mean that you don’t need to actually listen to it, unless you want to hear from the horse’s mouth.
I don't understand what practical difference you think that makes... it's the same shows, made by the same people, how you listen to it doesn't make any difference.
I think the key benefit of a narrow selection of live programming is the idea that a lot of people listen to the same things. The discussions that follow a program, between people who watched or listened to it (which could be a significant chunk of your friends or coworkers) is to me at least as important as the content itself.
With podcasts and streaming I often find the discussion starts and ends with "yes I listened to an interesting podcast about that...". Perhaps that will make someone else listen to it the next day, but the window of opportunity for discussion is gone.
Respectfully, you're not just wrong, you're wrongly wrong.
The nature coverage on BBC is an order of magnitude better than anything else on TV.
The science coverage on BBC is better than anyone else on TV.
The news coverage on BBC is better than anything else on TV.
And that's just the starters.
The podcast revolution were in right now? Brits have had that since the 70s with radio 4 producing great audio programs. Everything from science to history to drama to comedy. Their programming makes up a big chunk of the best podcasts and another chunk are ripoffs of BBC shows.
Streaming? BBC iPlayer was the trailblazer in that space.
And we're still not done.
The UK has a similar problem to US media: its mostly owned by crazy right wingers and what isn't spends a lot of time navel gazing and sharing cat in tree stories. Not the BBC, they keep breaking big stories. They don't care or have to care about the editorial line or commercial interests of their advertisers or even their viewers prejudices. And educated, informed voters are one reason we have maintained (just) decent healthcare and a semi working benefit system. They actually force other media to be better. That's why we don't have Foxx news and our antivaxx movement is smaller than the US or Frances.
I'm not saying they're perfect. I'm not saying they're always right or they couldn't do better.
I'm just saying, we need more than just the commercial model, be it ads or subscription based. There are 1001 things it doesn't do well. It does other things great. But it can't give you everything. Why not keep both?
I agree with what you said, but given there's only so many hours in the day, and I only watch TV to "switch my brain off", I didn't feel it worth the cost given that Netflix et al fills that hole just fine- for far less.
To get my science / nature / news I turn to podcasts.
A statistics program. Only about 20m per episode, they take a statistical question or a lie or similar and research where it came from and what the truth is. There are some really good episodes on Covid stats recently as well as a few that answer (disprove) articles that have cropped up here.
There's tons science courses, maths courses and stats courses on the internet where you learn these things in depth. Most documentaries are often 'pop' takes at things.
I think the BBC are actually really great at avoiding the pop trap. They either do it very well or they just don't do it. I'd point to a lot of popular podcasts as "pop" rip offs of BBC pieces.
"Stuff you should know" is really just "In Our Time" with easier topics and no experts for instance. Plus no 500 episode backlog over several decades.
a) I think BBC produces good content, but not good enough to warrant the current cost of a TV license.
b) Even if it did, I still would not pay for a license, as a reaction to its overreaching approach, obligatory character and dishonest reasoning. They are claiming that you need a license to watch any type of content made available in public in real time, with Youtube LIVE mentioned explicitly as an example -no particular reason this wouldn't include even things like gaming video streams a school kid would share for fun.
I don't think BBC should profit from the consumption of content it has contributed nothing towards. I'm not sure if that's more absurd when that content itself is provided for free by its authors, or when it's content you have already paid for.
> To encourage compliance, TV Licencing regularly sends sternly worded letters to those who have let their licence lapse or have not purchased one.
This is an understatement. It would be fairer to say they constantly spam you with scare mail.
> In the event this fails, they may arrange a visit from enforcement officers.
That's what they want you to think. In practice it never really happens. Too expensive. Hence the spam.
> These officers aren’t empowered to forcibly enter homes, so in the event a homeowner declines to cooperate with an investigation, TV Licencing will apply for a search warrant.
I would be quite surprised if this has actually ever happened.
It's pretty obvious they don't do any fancy detection these days (if they ever really did). It's just way too expensive.
The TV license collection & enforcement is outsourced to a terrible consulting company (Capita) which employs goons on commission so they have an incentive to lie and misrepresent themselves or what they’re allowed to do in order to sell a license.
This makes me feel bad for the people who actually do need and pay for a TV license since a chunk of that money is wasted on this scum instead of being used to fund the BBC or whatever the license is supposed to fund.
It's worth noting that the goons are private contractors, and have absolutely no rights beyond what the average bloke down the street would have. They can't enter your house without permission, and they can't force you to sign documents.
In the UK, we have a legal theory called the implied invitation, which means that it is implied (because it would otherwise be ridiculous) that any member of the public is invited to walk on your property up to your front door. This allows the postal service to put letters through your letter box, and people to knock on your door to say hi. However, this right can be revoked. You can write to Capita and state that you are withdrawing the implied invitation to all its members and agents, and that they are not welcome on your property. Then, they are not allowed to enter your property and are trespassing if they do, and you can call the police straight away without even warning them (because you did warn them already by post). Capita (despite its many faults) does seem to obey this.
I did this for my property shortly after I moved in. A little while later, a group of people did wander down the road. Half of them came onto the property and knocked on the door, claimed to be from Sky, and asked if we wanted to get satellite TV. The other half were wearing a different uniform and stayed outside the property. I strongly suspect that half was Capita agents who asked some Sky employees to help them out. Unfortunately, it was my wife who answered. Although she told them to go away, I would have been angry at them, because they had made the Sky employees into Capita agents, and therefore they were trespassing.
The threatening letters are atrocious. They are scary for anyone who doesn't know what they are doing, as they almost imply that your door is going to be broken down and you'll be hauled off to prison. I called Capita out on this. I wrote to them declaring that any further threatening letters from them would be classed as harassment, and that the police would be involved. They stopped sending them.
> That's what they want you to think. In practice it never really happens. Too expensive. Hence the spam.
It happened to me. A very nice man knocked on the door and delivered a speech about the licence fee. I told him we just use the TV to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime. He filled in a form and we haven't had one of those annoying letters since.
>> These officers aren’t empowered to forcibly enter homes, so in the event a homeowner declines to cooperate with an investigation, TV Licencing will apply for a search warrant.
> I would be quite surprised if this has actually ever happened.
Per the BBC/Capita own data available via FOI [0] (though not without them dragging their feet and making a simple process a protracted one... not to mention they tried to withdraw the documents provided [1]), in FY 2014/2015 there were 351 enforcement requests made for all of UK, the Capita/TVL Legal made 256 applications to court for a warrant, 167 of those were granted and 115 were actually executed after being granted.
If they think they have grounds they will absolutely try to get the warrant - and note that there is a disparity between what the "commercial" arm of the enforcement thinks they can push on (351) and what the court system thinks is actually suffcient (167).
That count does not include the times where Capita/TVL managed to get enough without going that fair (the 170k cases they managed to get without warranted visits, for instance).
It happened to me too. I didn't own a TV at the time and explained that at the doorstep. I invited them to come inside and look around the house to confirm, but they declined.
The vans were real. I remember one sitting outside my apt in England with the twirling antennae looking for felons who had a TV without paying a license fee.
It would be much easier to spot a TV flickering through a window. My guess is that's what they did, and then claim that they had detected it with their super duper high-tech antennas.
I believe the technology used to detect the signals as described in the article was also used during World War II to detect radio transmitters of spies and other operatives.
It’s very real technology.
Rather trivially, as any superheterodyne receiver from has an intermediate frequency oscillator that is mixed with the signal - and it is hard to not emit RF from that.
Modern equipment just tends to be better designed to tighter tolerances as both the standards on inadvertent emissions and manufacturing have been tightened so it emits much less - but still not zero.
In an era where we buy things on Amazon, which is famous for not paying all the due taxes, how do you plan to enforce this?
Also, I live 5km from the german border, I will just buy my TV there.
What was/is? existing is that every for every TV sales, you had to give your name to the shop, which would transmit it to the taxman.
One of the alternate mechanisms for funding includes the proposal of a so-called "Broadband Levy" which would be included on all subscriptions in the country and would replace the license fee, given the nature of viewing habits have significantly changed in the past 10 years.
It's not a recurring revenue stream like a subscription though; they'd need to apply a lot of tax to recover the same amount of money (something like £10/month IIRC)
If printer companies managed to get legislation written that allowed them to send people to knock on you door and check your printers are only using authorised ink.
Or Microsoft agents checking your OS licenses are in order.
MIKE: Good thinking, Vyv! We need information! [they run to the sofa]
VYVYAN: No! I'm just in time for Afternoon Plus!
[leaps on couch between Mike and Neil. Rick turns on a the TV. We see a test picture and soft music.]
Well turn it over then! [Rick changes the channel. Test picture and soft music]
VYVYAN: Well, you might as well try the other one!
RICK: Alright! Alright! [Rick changes the channel. Test pictue and soft music. The boys groan, Rick turns off the TV]
RICK: Absolutely pathetic! There's nothing on at all! Humph! Don't know why we bother to pay our license!
MIKE: We don't.
RICK: But, haven't we got a license?
MIKE: No.
RICK: But that makes me a criminal! [thinks about it] Right on! Yeah, this will shake them up at the Anarchists Society! Occupying the refectories!
So what? This is the real stuff! I'm a fugitive! A desperado! I'm going to form a new union society, right?
With me as president! 'People Who Don't Pay Their TV Licenses Against the Nazis!' [takes out pad and pen and starts writing] This is only the beginning!
I agree with the Beeb being publicly funded too, though would prefer it being part of normal taxation rather than the license fee which is so controversial.
But I don't think attacking American providers is a strong counter at all, the days when the BBC led the world in quality are long gone, HBO set the standard for modern drama which no British service has come close to matching; Netflix and Prime provide plenty of quality programmes too.
The BBC/C4 still compete on non-fiction, comedy and radio, but not drama.
I am not from the UK, but quite a large chunk of things I watch on YouTube are british panel shows. I'm just in love with them. Which seems funny to me, because as a non-uk twenty year old, I don't think that I'm the target demographic for these shows.
"8 out of 9 cats does countdown", "Would I lie to you?" and of course my favourite, "Taskmaster". Thanks for all of these great shows. "Blackadder", "A Bit of Fry and Laurie" and "Monty Python" are great as well...
I think you're more the target demographic than you think. Taskmaster didn't exist when I was still in the UK but the first two were popular enough with my age group at the time (20-30 year old students). You might also like "Have I Got News For You" - it's supposed to have gone a bit downhill recently, but at its peak it was stupendous.
I have a freesat box for the sole purpose of "Dave" which in the evening mostly broadcasts things like Taskmaster and re-runs of HIGNFY, Mock the Week and various other very British shows (best marketing ever for that channel was to do this so consistently that it's now a standing joke on several panel shows that it will be seen forever on Dave).
It's nice to just put on if I want something funny in the background while doing something else without the annoyance of being interrupted by things stopping and having to pick.
If the current government want to kill it completely why have the ruled out decriminalising non-payment of the licence fee? There are pretty strong ethical reasons for why you shouldn't get a criminal record and, possibly, face prison time for not paying for a TV licence, so it would be politically quite easy to pass.
>If the current government want to kill it completely why have the ruled out decriminalising non-payment of the licence fee?
They haven't, yet.
>There are pretty strong ethical reasons for why you shouldn't get a criminal record and, possibly, face prison time for not paying for a TV licence, so it would be politically quite easy to pass.
One doesn't face prison for non-payment of the license fee.
A custodial sentence can only be imposed if one fails to pay the court-ordered fine imposed as a punishment for non-payment of the license fee.
A lot of those shows aren't BBC though. Take that list in question:
- Taskmaster: Channel 4 (originally Dave. In fact before that it was a Edinburgh Fringe Festival show written by "little" Alex Horne)
- Would I Lie To You: BBC
- 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown: Channel 4 (interestingly it's a spin off of "8 out of 10 Cats" which was C4's sort of version of "Have I Got News For You" but C4 did an anniversary series of one off comedies one year, including bringing back "15 to 1" and a few other quiz shows from the channels early years. The "8 out of 10 cats does countdown" show was "Countdown" with the cast of "8 Out of 10 Cats" (hence the name) and proved so popular it became it's own show).
As for the classics in that list. While most were BBC, it's also fair to say most wouldn't have been the same low budget as Taskmaster et al.
Dave / UKTV might be owned by the BBC but they're not funded by the licence fee and operate independently. Much like the BBC America example I cited elsewhere. As you said yourself, it's a commercial station. So they wouldn't be subject to the same "squeezed" licence fee funding that we are discussing.
That's not fair, no. Channel 4 is a commercial station and doesn't receive any licence fee funding. Yes it is publicly owned but aside from that it shares no relation to the BBC.
It's probably also worth noting that the BBC does also have a few subsidiaries like BBC America which are also commercial entities and operate independently to BBC Television. They are at least owned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (albeit sometimes only in part), unlike Channel 4.
Would I Lie To You is my second favorite comedy show of all time, the first being Peep Show. I have been trying to score tickets to a taping of WILTY for years now. The form requires you to specify an address and each time I have to note that yes, I really would fly from California to Uxbridge to attend a taping. They never get back to me :)
WILTY tickets are insanely difficult to get, and even if you get them, if you don't have a car, or aren't located very close to the studio, then you're not going to have much luck. We did get the offer for WILTY tickets, but the logistics were simply intractable (living in London at the time).
Most mainstream UK shows are taped within, or nearby, London - and that works reasonably well. Arguably the hardest show to get into is QI, and we were coaxed into being in audience for Pointless in order to bump up our 'score' on the QI queue as it were. It's a weird old arrangement over there.
I have said this before and I will say it again...Dear BBC, please allow the rest of the world to pay for a subscription to the iPlayer. Just take my money, really, please?
They think they'll make more money by selling exclusive geographic rights to each show to some local TV station or streaming site in each country.
It makes a bit of sense - a local outfit probably has far more marketing reach, a bigger local audience, can schedule release at the optimal moment not during some local sport match, and can tailor the content locally (translations, censorship).
Britbox is supposed to be that, I think, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the BBC cannot legally sell iPlayer subscriptions as easily as you'd think because the BBC's copyright library (especially music) is unbelievable[1] compared to most other organizations, so they'd have to make multiple versions of everything on their books to deal with licencing issues. Lots of British shows get their soundtracks neutered because of this when they are sold abroad.
[1] Example: Sky Sports F1 is pretty big budget, but they're still stuck using [knock-off version of The Chain] rather than the real thing, whereas the BBC can break out a really expensive song (e.g. Money for nothing by Dire Straits) for a throwaway segment.
I’m surprised to hear that, because my understanding is that all the major broadcasters have a blanket licence to play all music (from major record labels). They can just stick a top 40 hit in the background of a soap without planning for it. Maybe that doesn’t apply to something as primary as the shows theme song.
I believe that’s exactly the problem - that licence is only good for the UK.
When shows are exported they’ll gut them. Top Gear is the best example I know of, on the netflix & bbc america versions, most the recognisable songs have been replaced by musak.
Unfortunately this is common across many countries. I'm an expat in UK and would love to get (paid) access to content from my home country (in UE) but it's simply not possible.
Not really. There are probably ton's of licence boilerplate that requires extra money for the possibility that someone might watch from a different country.
Even content that appears to be directly from the BBC is probably created by some firm that and gave it under some licence terms to the BBC.
There was a stalled imitative to end this bullshit at least inside the EU but the content-lobby was stronger.
As I've mentioned in my bigger comment down the thread, the BBC's music (and other material, even things like Album Covers) library is genuinely gargantuan.
Mainly the wide array of in-depth documentaries presented by experts.
Yes, there've been loads of TOTP reruns since their budget was slashed and there may be some overlap with Sky Arts in some areas, but no channel comes close.
Notable excellent non-docs include Screenwipe, Only Connect, Detectorists (my favourite sitcom from the last ten years), The Thick of It.
I'd pay my licence fee just for BBC4, Radio 4 and BBC News.
The BBC's peak output isn't all that different from anywhere else, but the professionalism and quality of median BBC show exceeds pretty much anywhere else I find - History documentaries that aren't about Ancient Aliens (low-hanging fruit, but still).
Between myself and my wife...Dr. Who, University Challenge, Only Connect, Death In Paradise, Escape To The Country, Top Gear (they have the formula right now after some false starts), tons of good mystery shows, lots of great new comedies, etc. I can “find” them all elsewhere but I would be happy to pay for them as a service.
Your argument only works under the assumption that money=speech, a belief that doesn't hold up to much scrutiny.
AFAIK, it's perfectly legal to speak in support of, say, an active terrorist organization. I doubt it is legal in many places to donate money to support an active terrorist organization.
If you believe that money=speech, the law is inconsistent in this matter. Assuming you want the law to be consistent, there are really only two ways to resolve the inconsistency:
1. Speaking in support of terrorist organizations should be illegal, or
2. Donating money to terrorist organizations should be legal.
I disagree with both these statements, so to me, money /= speech.
The example should be voluntarily paying a writer to write what I deem truth worthy, vs the state threatening with violence if I refuse to pay for what they want me to pay for.
In my country Sweden the state media is very biased and paints my points of views in a bad light - but I am forced to fund them.
I encourage Americans here to cherish not having to have that.
> In my country Sweden the state media is very biased and paints my points of views in a bad light - but I am forced to fund them.
I understand that that's frustrating for you, my objection with your post is merely your claim that this constitutes forced speech. It does not, unless you believe that money=speech. Some people hold that belief, but I suspect very few of them will be consistent about accepting the logical consequences of that belief (therefore they don't really hold the belief, they just reasoned backwards to justify a belief they _do_ hold).
There's nothing in the belief that speech should be free and unforced that prohibits state-owned media (as long as other speech is not suppressed), or even outright state propaganda. That doesn't mean you can't be against these things, merely that being against these things doesn't automatically follow from believing in that free and unforced speech is a fundamental right.
If you want to make the case that state-owned media are immoral (which, just to be clear, I don't currently believe), you need to refer to different rights. I've heard some people on the internet make the claim, for instance, that all taxes constitute theft, and that taxes are fundamentally immoral. I don't believe this at all, but that would give you a moral basis to renounce state media.
But really, sometimes the state is just going to do something that you don't like, perhaps even hate with a passion, without violating a fundamental right. I know I'd be furious if the state broadcaster started propagandizing a religion, for instance, but as long as they don't infringe on my freedom to believe what I want, they're not violating any of my rights (I could, at most, argue that it's a slippery slope to violating my rights, which may be a convincing argument by itself).
If you have to have snooping vans prowling the streets to catch people listening to what's openly being broadcast over the airwaves to make them pay, maybe you've set up your system wrong...
Advertising free children’s TV (and radio) may have delayed the onset or rampant consumerism fuelled by commercial TV elsewhere.
The BBC microcomputer project is arguably the origin of ARM CPU’s.
Initially the license fee was for radios, I can’t find a reference but I remember being told as a child that politicians saw the risks of radio propaganda and legislated to mandate broadcast media to be politically unbiased .
It’s interesting seeing suggestions on the recent threads about EU funding for a WhatsApp alternative - perhaps the license fee could also fund the infrastructure for something like signal.
What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_...