Welcome to the concept of public service broadcasting. Not the emaciated embarassment which is PBS, but the genuine thing.
Does the BBC make a significant contribution to Britain which could not be provided by commercial means? I believe so, and many Brits agree. On the other hand, I have to accept that it’s not something that can ever be definitively proven either way. But the argument is not simply about ‘ad-free programming’.
Here’s what I’ve got out of the BBC in the past twenty-four hours:
Watched a live broadcast of a Mahler symphony
Listened to both Israeli and Lebanese politicians be interviewed, and not in a soundbite fashion
Put together a set of links to educational games on their website, directly relevant to the appropriate music curriculum
Heard some great funk-dance-type-stuff music I’d never heard before
Could I have done any of this through the commercial media in Britain? Probably not. If the BBC was to be turned into a commerical organisation, how much of this would survive? Not much. Do I feel my 39 pence licence fee for those 24 hours was money well-spent? I’ll let you guess.
I don’t know; I just don’t like having my collar felt. I’m sure the problems of enforcement could be quite easily tackled by the application of a little technology, such as some kind of decoder device, that allowed you to watch the content as long as you had an unexpired digital licence of some kind.
Anyway, I have no objection to the licence fee itself; I actually think it’s a great thing, because it (in concept, at least) should allow the BBC the freedom to develop content that stimulates and challenges, provokes interest in fringe and minority topics, etc, rather than just pandering to the lowest common denominator that arises from trying to get the best ratings so that commercial funding will work. It’s the difference between art and commerce.
Of course, I’m not going to argue that the BBC always achieves such lofty goals, but there have been instances where the BBC broke ground (particularly in the fields of comedy and documentary), leaving the commercial companies to play a frantic game of catch-up.
To contrast this , just look at what has happened to ITV with all that advertising revenue at its disposal. Its market share is the lowest its ever been, it wants to get out of children’s television altogether, it is cutting down on the length of its news bulletins and it does not have any proper documentary or arts programmes. It now seems to churn out endless variations of “celebrity love island” type programmes . I know the BBC also broadcasts them as well, but at least they are balanced with others which cater for a much wider audience.
I’m guessing as well spent as my 39 pence would have been.
My girlfriend’s SKY connection was downgraded for a few days while she caught up with bills. All I got were a few of the freeview channels and really, I missed little from the rest of the SKY package. No, I did miss one lot of channels, the UKTV channels, which are basically re-runs of BBC shows, comedy, documentaries etc
What I’ve learned from TV I’ve learned mostly from BBC News and Documentaries (Og bless Sir David Attenborough!), comedies have been divided between C4 and the Beeb. Having to wait for a drip feed of US sitcoms is a price to pay true, but not too high.
I don’t believe that a hundred million people did watch TV in the 50s. Anyway, a lot of markets had only one or two TV stations. Reception could get pretty bad, too, so just because you could get a channel doesn’t mean it was worth trying to watch it. If your area was too sparsley populated, you might not have anyone willing to pay enough for advertising to cover the fixed costs of broadcasting. Or you may have had one station that survived by being the only game in town.
When I was growing up in Montana in the '70s, we got one channel from Great Falls, one from Butte, and, on a clear day, one from Lethbridge, Alberta. I remember the weather report always sounded beyond strange to a kid raised in a Farenheit world: “Current temperature in Moose Jaw is six.” If there was nothing on any of the three channels, you had to turn the TV off and, I don’t know, go outside or something.
And Og forbid if the President was giving a speech. You were screwed then. It was on every channel. Well, not in LA. You could always find an independent station that was running wrestling from Olympic Stadium or something.
I’d just like to quickly point out that in most cities these days you do have competing providers. I have a choice in my neighborhood between TimeWarner, iO (Cablevision) and RCN. It is however, not uncommon for highrise buildings to contract with a rinky-dink cable provider for sole access to the building. You usually get either cheap or even free cable, but the channel selections usually leave much to be desired.
I don’t think it’s unfair for the BBC to be funded by public monies, however I question the fairness of this collection method. When were the licenses first issued? I can see the fairness when TV’s first came out and few had them, why pay for the BBC if you couldn’t watch it? However with the ubiquity of TV’s today it seems like an outdated method that is unfair to the poor.
The licences were first issued back in the early 1920’s when, of course, they were just for radio sets. In addition, for the first few years, the radio set manufacturers had to pay a small fee to the BBC for each radio set they sold. The idea behind this form of funding came about after representative from the BBC and the government paid a visit to the USA , heard the commercial stations there, thought they were of low standard and decided that they did want the same thing to happen in the UK. This website Shows the cost of the licence since 1922.
I think Sublight is one of those evil people who don’t pay their NHK fee (of course, I could be cruely maligning him by conflating his position with another friend of mine who I know takes delight in making up the most outrageous excuses when they come knocking to collect). I don’t have a choice, 'cause it’s part of my mansion fee.
Concerning whether someone wants to pay for BBC (or PBS, or NPR, or whatever) whether they themselves use those channels or not:
Governments provide many services paid for by taxes, and probably none of them have 100% support from the populace. If you don’t like public broadcasting, you are free in our democracies to organize opposition, lobby legislative institutions, and try to vote in representatives who would overturn those services you dislike.
I fail to see how the UK’s TV policy is morally or ethically different from the US’s funding of PBS using tax revenue, etc. The exception would be if someone uses their TV only to watch DVDs; I’m sure that situation is vanishingly rare. We all end up paying (via taxes) for services that someone else uses.
Is the British TV license fee really all that different from the way school taxes work in most parts of North America?
Recently, some of the suburbs of Toronto have started charging for people who put more than a certain number of garbage bags [‘rubbish bins’ for those Brits not yet brainwashed by American media :D] out for pickup every week. However, my ex-'s parents in Pennsylvannia have to pay the county’s garbage contractor every month, regardless of whether they have anything ever picked up, simply by virtue of living in that county.
I can see where the objection to most tax analogies will come - the TV licence is a fixed fee, not a progressive tax. I’m presuming school taxes aren’t a set amount for every resident, irrespective of income or other wealth?
I think most of my rejection of this idea is the word “license.” To me this implies that it can be refused by the Government. That and the fact that it is an annual charge. If the PTB want to add a surcharge when you buy the set for the funding of programming, ok. But every year, no way.
BTW, I don’t think PBS should get a cent of any tax money. If they can’t cut it in the competitive market, too bad.
So they claim. In the US it was supposed to happen via our cable company (in accordance to fed regs, they said) in October of 2004. Then 2007. Now supposedly February 17, 2009…
I feel a little for the people in the UK, really. On the other hand, at least they’re arguably getting their money’s worth. When I was in college, we were charged a $50/semester fee for cable reception in the dorms. Every person who lived on campus was charged this fee. Why is this bad? Because there was no cable in the dorms the first year I went there! They charged a fee for a service that didn’t exist for over a year. :mad:
Really? In Denver/Boulder we’ve had a choice of Comcast, Comcast, or Comcast. I’m sure you’ve got choices in New York, but I’d need a cite for “most cities.”