BBC America is jointly owned by AMC and BBC (with the magic split proportion of 51.1/49.9%).
So AMC is basically in charge but if it did something the Beeb didn’t like, they’d likely start losing programming and have other issues.
It does air BBC World News, so that segment at least is fairly high quality.
The channel is funded by ads and cable company rights fees.
That must indeed be some magic mathematics given that it adds up to 101%. 
Typo! It was supposed to add up to 99%. 
The people who get prosecuted for TV license evasion are seldom mavericks keen on testing the limits of state power.
The reality is rather sad. They are often mothers at home looking after the children who are poor, maybe living on welfare. Imagine the scene: the kids are watching Childrens BBC and then suddenly the TV licensing people knock on the door and ask their mother two questions: Do you have a TV? Do you have a license? If the answer is Yes and No they write it on their clip board and go away. Then a few weeks later a Court Summons will be delivered charging them with license evasion. If they ignore it, they will get a fine of about £200 or so for a first offence. If they don’t pay the fine the court has the power to jail them.
This happened to a friend of mine some years ago and he decided to have his day in court and explain the family circumstances before the magistrates. He went to a court house and asked the clerk. The clerk looked at him as if he was mad. Then simply said ‘Name?’ and then rummaged through a big stack of Court papers intended for the attention of the Magistrate until he found the one with my friends name on it. It held it up between his two fingers and then dropped it into the waste paper bin and smiled and said “Good day!” and that was that. He said it reminded him of a Monty Python sketch.
The way it seemed to work is that the magistrate just goes through the pile of papers stamping each one with a verdict and standard fine.
In the past the local newspapers would regularly list all the miscreants who had been fined in this way.
Harassment by bombarding people with letters written in intimidating language is obviously the most cost effective means of intimidating people into paying the license fee. Then comes the ‘detectives’ who knock on doors and ask the two questions. At the same time all the TV ads and propaganda about detectors vans stalking the streets with their ever so sophisticated technology to reinforce the message that there in no escape. They also now require you to log into BBC iPlayer and I expect they try to harass you by email suggesting they know you are watching via streaming so pay up.
Sure the BBC has some good quality TV and has editorial independence from the politicians. But it comes at the cost of collecting a tax that is regressive, penalising the poorest people in the community.
Eventually this will have to change.
Sadly, there does not seem to be a model out there that reconciles the need for a revenue stream for public broadcasting yet keeps the politicians off its back. We are stuck with this antiquated and oppressive licensing system that amounts to BBC’s dirty laundry.
The BBC gets £3.7 billion from the UK license payers out of £4.89 billion of total income.
I do wonder if it could be totally self financing if it tried harder to sell a streaming service around the world.
I guess the Britbox service is a step in that direction.
Though it would not be simple, as this article explains.
https://www.tvlicenceresistance.info/forum/index.php/topic,17669.0.html
The TV licence fee in Germany (about € 17 per month) pertains to every household, not regarding if it has a TV set, radio or computer (thus having made the spying measures superfluous that had been applied formerly similar like in Britain). But if you are on welfare, you are exempt from the licence, so something like that wouldn’t happen here.
If the TV Licensing Fee in Germany is assessed to every household whether it has a TV or not, then in what sense is it a TV Licensing fee? Sounds to me like it’s a one-size-fits-all household tax on every household just for being a household.
How widely known is the abbreviation “TV” or the word “teevee” on the east side of the Pond?
How widely used is it?
Clicking randomly around Google translate, it looks as if most countries (all that I saw) use a description that sounds very much like ‘television’ (usually abbreviated to the local language equivalent of ‘TV’) or, simply, ‘TV’ in whatever script they use.
I would say the Tee Vee is universally understood.
The only one that doesn’t, to my knowledge, is German, where the term “Fernsehen” (=“distant viewing”) was adopted. Same meaning, but it was just at the time when foreign loanwords were considered unpatriotic, shall we say.
(FWIW, a number of pedants did point out that “Tele” is Greek and “vision” is Latin, so they shouldn’t be combined in one word, but the boat had already sailed).
See my post #22. Many people in Germany agree with you, but when they tried to take this matter to the courts (to either force the government to admit it was an involuntary across-the-board tax, or else to force the government to confirm that it is a licence fee payable only by those who possess equipment capable of receiving broadcasts) the case got thrown out.
TV is a bit long to say, so in the UK you often hear people refer to it is the ‘Telly’ in casual conversation.
Also, some horrifying creatures run around with them in their abdomens.
While carrying a purple handbag, what’s more. Still, that’s public service broadcasting for you. The Murdochs of this world pursue other fantasies.
Yes, Fernsehen (the medium) and Fernseher (TV set) are the original German terms, but we have adopted the shorter TV also like so many other words from English.
I hope it isn’t unacceptably off-topic to opine “Unless ‘this guy’ is Julian Assange.”
By coincidence, I was watching one of those great videos from Mr. Carlson’s Lab on YouTube today. He does old electronic restoration and such. In the one I was watching about fixing up an RF pre-amp, he mentions the license fee the government had during WWII and how one of these could help avoid being detected by tracking vans since the IF signal was further removed from the antenna.
There was a radio receiver license fee in the US during WWII? Nope, checking it turns out he’s Canadian. Hard to find more info using the obvious keywords since there’s broadcaster licenses, etc. But I did find an article mentioning fees in the 1930s.
The TV licence was a natural outgrowth of the wireless licence, which was granted you by the Postmaster General and which anybody who operated a wireless powered by mains electricity had to buy (many people had ones powered by wet batteries, which you took down to the radio shop to be recharged).
This is one well-remembered public information film BBC TV Licensing™ 1977 Propaganda - They're Watching Columbo!! - YouTube
The wireless licence was abandoned in 1971, probably because the advent of cheap portable transistor receivers made it unenforceable.
I legally own two televisions without having a TV Licence. Anyone who watches, records, or streams any programme as it is being shown must have one. This is not limited to television - if you watch it live via your computer you must have a licence as must anyone who uses BBC iPlayer (including catchup).
My televisions are used for DVDs, xBox, YouTube (nothing live), Netflix, and Amazon Prime. I get a form every year or two asking me to verify that I am still not in need of a licence, which I diligently fill in. Nobody has ever come to check.
It’s not regressive. If anything, it’s just not progressive, though presumably “the poorest people in the community” are least likely to have TVs.
I’m not sure whether the same is true of NHK, but the BBC’s licensing fees are are certainly not a racket. Whether you want/watch it or not, an independent broadcasting service which provides public-interest programming rather than just profit-focused programming is A Good Thing.
In any case, public funding for the arts is pretty much ubiquitous worldwide. If you get rid of TV license fees, you’ll have to get rid of museum grants, tax breaks for film production, publicly-funded sports stadiums, ad nauseam.
I did some research on this topic recently when I updated Wikipedia’s History of broadcasting in Canada page. After the lifting of the restrictions on civilian radio after the end of World War One, initially private citizens operating radio equipment, even if it was just for receiving and not transmitting, had to be fully licenced as an amateur radio operator. In 1922 the federal government introduced the Private Receiving Station licence for individuals interested in receiving radio broadcasts, which had to be renewed annually at a fee of $1 per year. The licence fee eventually rose to $2.50 per year to provide revenue for both radio and television broadcasts by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It was eliminated effective April 1, 1953. (In contrast, the U.S. has never had any licences or fees for radio or TV reception).