IIRC, it’s the property that is licensed, not the individual. So if I, as a responsible adult, get a TV licence for the TV in my house, that;s no help to my feckless adolescent offspring who keep a television in some other house. They need a licence which covers that property; my licence is for my house, not theirs.
Yes, I’m delighted to pay for the BBC to produce world-class nature programs, costume dramas, unbiased news, films with no commercials* and Doctor Who 
.
*UK commercial channels have about 8 minutes per hour of advertising; the US has an astonishing 18 minutes of ads per hour! :eek:
Pity us poor sods in Ireland. We pay a tv licence fee and still get ads and shit programmes.
Bah. In the US you pay a TV license fee equivalent* whether you’ve got a TV or not and our publicly-funded broadcasts are… 30 year old BBC sitcoms. And the Antiques Roadshow.
*since public broadcasters are supported by the federal budget.
In spite of the gradually decreasing acceptance of the licence fee as a means of funding public service broadcasting here, and the multiplication of channels and ways of paying for them, it still commands a wide measure of acceptance/compliance here.
It’s normally the case that stores will attempt to get you to comply with the notification requirements when selling you a set, to the extent that they may well refuse to complete the sale without it. Of course, private sales are effectively unregulatable; sets are regularly given away on freecycle.
The Irish Republic only got a State TV service in 1961. It was to be the then-new 625-line standard, however many people in the border counties had bought 405-line sets and been receiving 405-line signals from BBC Ulster and Ulster TV for years so the service had to be duplicated to keep them happy. On the eastern and south-eastern coast of Ireland it was just about possible to receive signals from England or Wales, providing you erected a whacking great antenna on top of a sixty-foot pole. There wasn’t much the BBC could do about this, although the weather forecast maps mysteriously ended (and still do) at the Northern Ireland border - apparently the Republic doesn’t have any weather. Nowadays BBC programs are carried on cable/satellite throughout most of the Republic, so presumably some sort of financial deal has been done with the providers to pay for it.
Rupert Murdoch hates the BBC as the only serious rival to his dominance of broadcasting and, through his mouthpiece, made a strong attack on its continued existence recently.
A slight hijack here but somewhat related to the discussion .
Recently in the UK we now have to pay a licence fee to the Performing Right Society for the right to listen to music via a radio or other means, this doesn’t apply to homes yet but if you want to listen to music at work or in a bar etc a licence fee has to be paid every year.
More information here
And here
I agree - because of the BBC’s funding model, they can take risks that commercial channels might fight shy of (if a possible outcome of those risks happened to be detrimental to ad revenue, for example) - and they don’t just have to do whatever is popular.
Looking back, I’m not sure we’d have had things like Monty Python without the BBC being the way it is.
Given the current state of the BBC, programmes like Python probably wouldn’t get the go ahead today, or would be cancelled before they had a chance to bed down.
Dunno - there are still channels for experimental stuff (BBC Three and Four mostly) - but i’m not sure there is as much ground left to be broken today as there was in the past.
I accept what they say, but it just doesn’t seem to make any sense, I get the shows, without paying for them in effect.
Is it some sort of legal loophole that stops them having to hassle people who have a tape of a show recorded in someone else’s house?
Ah, I think I remember Dad asking for “dual standard” TVs in the past, and having a black and white set in my room as a kid with two dials, one of which tuned in the Beeb and the other RTE. Was it VHF vs UHF? I remember having to fine tune the BBC knob, but the other had set points that it clicked round to. No way of testing that now, the sets got old, dusty and were chucked out.
We had one of those dual standard TVs too (the conversion to 625-line standard took some time in England and not all areas changed at the same time) and I remember the two dials, one clicking. My family wasn’t going to pay good cash money for a colour set when the monochrome one still had life in it so it wasn’t until the mid-70s that we got colour TV.
The retailer isn’t required or expected to verify the information, just to collect it. The details are then sent to TV licensing who check it against the database. If the name and address match a license-holder, great, if it doesn’t a vaguely theatening letter gets sent out to the address telling you to buy a license. So as long as the retailer captures a name and address, they’re complying with the law.
You think businesses would routinely ignore an opportunity to capture personal information on their customers - and then if challenged on why they’re collecting it, can honestly say that it’s a legal requirement?
News story today:
- Firms issued TV licence warning *
Businesses could be breaking the law if staff watch live TV on their computers when the firm does not have a TV licence.
I guess you’re right. AFAICT, the law says that it is an offence for the retailer to “knowingly or recklessly furnish any information which is false in a material particular” (Wireless Telegraphy Act 1967 (repealed)). And I doubt that a court would consider it “reckless” to trust that the customer is telling the truth and submit whatever details they provide.
You don’t “get hounded.” I got a letter about the TV license, called the number on the letter, explained to the nice gentleman that I didn’t believe it applied as I didn’t watch TV.
“Oh, so you don’t have a TV?”
“There is one in the flat actually, but it isn’t even connected to the antenna outside.”
“All right. And do you watch TV over the internet?”
“I watched a couple of Doctor Who episodes once, but nothing for months.”
“DVDs or anything like that?”
“Yes, I’ve got several, both movies and TV series.”
“OK, then you don’t need a license, I’ll make a note. Thank you and have a nice day!”
If you consider that “get hounded,” may you never figure out what the expression actually means!
Hey, I didn’t say it made good business sense; I just said that it was fairly routine. Some smaller stores (non-chains) may not have the administration in place to do data collection and mining on their customers. And some larger stores may have policies in place to do so, but don’t do a good enough job of making their employees follow the policy. And some stores will follow the law only to the extent that it doesn’t require that they collect any information they don’t already collect. For example, if you order a TV from Amazon.co.uk, they don’t make you fill out any special form. They probably pass your name and billing address on to TVL. But they certainly don’t ask for the address where the TV is to be installed, which is also a legal requirement on their part.
If you buy a TV from Argos and use the in-store self-buy facility via that key-pad device, then you have to enter your address before you can complete the transaction.