As more and more people watch TV on portable devices, will there be (or is there already) fees on laptops, tablets, and smart phones?
There is already a fee. TV licensing rules. Any time that you’re watching or recording live TV, you need a TV licence.
With the emphasis on “live”. If you watch on the catch-up BBC iPlayer service, you don’t need a license,
Baron! We are British, you know. Licence.
Och bollocks. Please don’t black-ball me. I’ve a mental block with that one I’m afraid. 
What does it mean, “och bollocks”?
I think you do, at least in principle, although they may not have found a good way to enforce it yet. But, come to that, they are unlikely to catch you if you watch “live” TV without a licence, on a traditional set. Despite that, most people do seem to buy a licence, thanks, I suppose, to a mixture of vague threats and appeals to conscience.
What the OP may possibly not understand, is that you do not have to licence each device. One licence applies to whole household, and you can have as many devices to actually watch on as you like, whether they be smartphones or traditional TVs, or whatever (and any member of the household can watch on mobile devices outside the home, so long as their household is licenced). Thus “extra” fees, of teh kind the OP seems concerned about, are not an issue.The fee is £145.50 per year, which really is not too exorbitant (and probably, in most people’s minds, not enough to make it worthwhile to try to cheat, even though the likelihood of getting caught is probably very low). You can also get a licence for black and white watching only for £45, but I doubt whether very many people do that these days.
You do not need a licence at all to listen to BBC (or any other) radio; it only applies to TV.
No, you don’t. From iPlayer FAQs http://iplayerhelp.external.bbc.co.uk/tv/tvlicence
Well, OK, but on the other hand, BBC iPlayer TV (unlike radio, either “catch-up” or live streamed) is embargoed outside the UK. I think they must just be assuming that any UK TV viewer is going to have at least a home set, and thus is already required to have a licence, which would cover them. That is probably 99.9% true, now, but may not be so for ever. My guess is that the law simply has not been rewritten yet to cover such things as iPlayer, but, if it becomes at all common for people rely on iPlayer (and its equivalents at the commercial channels) and to give up having TV sets altogether, the BBC will be lobbying very hard to make it a requirement to have a licence to watch iPlayer too.
“Oh, balls!” (“Och” is a Scottish thing.)
[Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Ed Bollocks, probably has no hope of ever becoming Prime Minister.]
I think you are right - the current law/funding model probably won’t survive more than one more Charter renewal
Yeah, actually I didn’t realize it was a household license (licence), but it guess it makes more sense, as a per device fee could get very spendy.
I should add that it is only the BBC that is funded by the licence fee. All the other channels are either subscription (Sky TV), or free and funded by ads. There are also a number of soft porn channels which, I assume, are paid for by the hour.
I pay the licence and get a load of other channels OTA to my PVA, or in HD, directly to my TV. Some channels that are exclusive to Sky, are not available to me, but I really don’t care.
So all my TV viewing, whatever device I use, costs me £145 a year. In four years time, when I turn 75, I will cost me nothing. I will have to consider whether I will allow my wife to watch as well:)
I’m in Ireland, not the UK, but here things are changing. At the moment you only need a TV licence if you actually have a TV - so people who only watch TV on other devices don’t have to pay. This is becoming common enough that the government is planning to switch from a TV licence fee to a Public Service Broadcasting Charge which every household will have to pay, telly or no telly.
I really wish we hadn’t fought the revolution, just a bunch of guys who didn’t what to pay their taxes, until I read stuff like this.
Right, but it would still be illegal to watch them (live as broadcast) without a licence, even though none of their revenue comes from the licence fee.
Another oddity of the system is that the TV licence fee pays not only for BBC TV, but also for BBC domestic radio (BBC World Service radio is paid for directly by the government, out of general taxation, I believe, as it is considered an instrument of British foreign/diplomatic policy), and for the very extensive bbc.co.uk web site.* There are about 10 national BBC radio channels (depending how you count - it’s complicated), and numerous regional and local ones, and anyone can listen, quite legally, without needing a licence, including people in other countries, who can get it via both live online stream and, for much of it “catch-up” streams.
You used to need to buy a radio licence too, but they gave up on that decades ago.
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*But not for the bbc.com web site, which is advertising supported, but which cannot be accessed from Britain (well, not without going through a proxy), because the BBC cannot, by law, advertise to the British people (except for stuff like trailing its own programmes). This can be quite annoying. I have sometimes followed links to interesting looking articles on bbc.com and found myself blocked, and the content is not always available on bbc.co.uk. I suppose any profits from bbc.com, and from ventures like BBC America (as well as stuff like selling programmes to PBS, NPR, and other broadcasters in the USA and other countries), do find their way back into the BBC coffers back home, and may be used to help support domestic broadcasting.
NHK, the public broadcaster in Japan, charges what they call a “receiving fee” in officially translated materials. It is paid per household and is required if you have any device capable of receiving NHK broadcasts, including laptops, smartphones, and tablets if those devices have a tuner, be it for regular terrestrial signals or 1seg.
While the Broadcast Law clearly makes it a legal obligation to pay this fee, it does not prescribe any punishment for failure to comply, so non-payment is pretty common, especially among the expat community. However, NHK agents are incredibly persistent in getting people into contracts and will constantly visit your home until you do. (I don’t generally watch TV, but in the interest of being an upstanding member of society, I begrudgingly entered into an annual contract)
Slight hijack:
I assume if you live in the UK and have cable/satellite then the license fee is included in your provider’s bill. You’d only have to pay it separately if you use an antenna. So how do they detect modern flat screen TVs? I’d imagine that plasmas, LCDs, LEDs etc. don’t emit nearly as much electromagnetic radiation as CRTs did.
I should note that I’m basing all this on an episode of The Young Ones (“Bomb”) with the ‘TV Detector Man’ (“Bastard’s the name, but you can call me Right Bleeding…”) so maybe I’m totally off base… 
13,000 current black and white licenses. More shocking is that there were almost 50,000 as late as 2006. Never underestimate how cheap people can be (or how many pensioners are still alive).
Actually I don’t think this is the case. Certainly when I last lived in the UK my annual cable charge was much less than the license fee so clearly didn’t include it.
There were warning commercials on British TV for some years implying they had detector vans that could detect CRTs. But I think it was a deliberately concocted myth, and I think they stopped trying to claim that they could do that years before flatscreens even entered the mix.
But still, we could say how do law enforcement detect an unlicensed firearm in a home? They can’t, but still most people would not want to take the risk.
(quite a difference between a TV and a gun, but you get my point).