A few points on how the fee works. The License fee system can seem both authoritarian and old fashioned to people. But the theory behind it is follows:
(1) It allows for 100% independent broadcasting in as much as absolutely no one owns the BBC. It is a service paid for exclusively by subscription (but, yes the subscription is compulsory). This is still a pretty unique concept and differs from, for example PBS, because there is zero advertising. No ownership and no pressure from advertisers.
(2) The fee provides two national tv channels, a 24 hour national news channel and countless regional tv channels (so everyone has access to at least three channels of which one also has local content interspersed). Then there are an awful lot of national and regional radio station. It’s web site (www.bbc.co.uk) is thousands of pages long and is the most viewed site in Europe.
(3) The guiding principle of BBC public broadcasting is quality broadcasting, (nurturing talent and taking risks with untried talent) and education in the broadest sense.
Benny Hill, for example, is not a BBC product but rather from commercial tv whereas Monty Python, The Young Ones, Fawly Towers, etc are BBC programmes. Sometimes it’s weird to think of all the grannies paying for that kind of show to be made but it does make sense.
(4) Understanding the importance of public broadcasting in the UK requires a totally different mind set from that of the US PBS system. It is absolutely fundamental to maintaining and increasing standards. That is it’s crucial role and it is supported by average viewing figures of about 50% of all tv viewing.
(5) Commercial tv is never ‘free’. Putting aside the obvious examples of cable and other ‘pay as you go’ methods, commercial tv (in the UK) costs approx 80% more TO RUN than does the BBC – for similar viewing figures. That money comes from advertising and drips down to consumers. American tv is not free, you pay for it every time you go to the supermarket, or shopping or whatever (because it sure as heck doesn’t come out of profits > shareholder dividends). In this light the BBC and it’s ethos is seen as highly valuable, an independent (politically and financially) institution that provides very good value for money.
It could also, if you chose to put that particular spin on it, be viewed in McCarthy terms as ‘socialised tv’, rather like our ‘socialised medicine (not).
And, as is the case with the National Health Service – which Thatcher attempted to change, if the politicians tried to interfere, it is unlikely they would not get re-elected. The BBC is seen as part of the national heritage. It’s important, it’s independent and it belongs to the people.
So enough about the ethics of the system - I want to crack it.
But first, to clarify, is it the CRT that they detect or an oscillator inside the TV? Assuming it’s the former: say you install a TV card in your PC, are they going to detect the radiation from your monitor? What happens if your TV is front or rear projection? How about a plasma display? What if you take an American TV over there (which is in NTSC format, not the British PAL format).
If it’s an oscialltor, can’t a complex series of analog/digital ciruits at least produce a different signal? I would think (this is my programmer-side speaking), that upon reception of the raw analog signal, it could be digitally decoded and filtered by software into a picture and sound, thereby circumventing any oscillator.
mattk, your link is the official story, and I was looking for something like that and couldn’t find it. Congratulations! I need to hone my searching skills. :o
From the site mattk found, the official line on TV detector vans:
The first trick to cracking the system is to obtain a TV without getting a license. This is pretty difficult, I think. When you purchase a TV from a store, they apply for the initial license for you. If you buy a TV from an individual, they’ve got a license that they want to make sure the license bureau know they don’t have a TV for anymore, so they are gonna tell the TV license bureau that they sold their old TV to you. There’s probably not a lot of people who are going to be willing to help you get away with it. I don’t know how the process works for decommissioning a TV? Maybe you could pretend your TV is broken, but you’d probably have to buy another TV so the TV police wouldn’t be suspicious…
Once you’ve gotten a TV sans license, it’s probably pretty easy to shield the local oscillator to prevent detection. A big Faraday shield around the outside of the TV should do it. Most modern picture tubes already have a Faraday shield on the front - built in to the glass.
Not really. The raw analog signal is at a frequency of a few hundred megahertz, and it occupies a bandwidth of 6 MHz (again, I’m speaking of US systems, assuming the UK is similar). Digitizing at that frequency is not possible with the amplitude range needed to dig a clean signal out of it. So what they do in a receiver first is to downconvert. If your signal is in the range 170 to 176 MHz, then you take an oscillator running at 170 MHz and send those two into the inputs of a mixer. (A mixer is just a nonlinear device, like a diode, which causes frequencies to change). What comes out of the mixer is the TV signal occupying 0 to 6 MHz. So in this scheme, you just have to change the frequency of the TV set’s own (local) oscillator depending on the channel you want to tune in, and treat what comes out of the mixer the same no matter what channel.
You can then digitize that “baseband” signal, but the first step will always need to be a local oscillator to downconvert the received signal. I’m skipping over some details about preamplifiers and dual sidebands, but I think you get the general idea.
I think this was once the case, but it isn’t any more. Probably due to the number of households with multiple TVs. I bought one a couple of years ago and nobody asked anything about a licence.
How they really enforce it is to harrass anybody who doesn’t have a licence on the assumption that they will almost certainly have a TV.
A friend of mine who genuinely didn’t have a TV got repeated letters and visits from them over a period of about six months until he told them to either take him to court or leave him alone. It may have been related to the fact that he had had a TV at that address in the past but had got rid of it.
BTW, is anybody costing these proposed evasion techniques? Bearing in mind that the fee is just over £100 p.a. and even if you can shield your set from the detector, you’re still running the risk of a £1,000 fine if they can prove by some other means you’ve got a TV, a shielding device would have to be pretty cheap to be cost-effective.
Is this licensing fee per TV, or per household? If I have two TV sets in my house, do I pay the same amount as somebody with only one, or do I pay more?
“BTW, is anybody costing these proposed evasion techniques?”
It works as a scare tactic i.e “It could be you next” so a few detector vans randomly covering large urban area’s in a well publicised fashion (hmmm, on the tv) pretty much does the trick.
Also, i just moved and after asking for a phone line to be re-connected a License Fee letter just happened to drop through the letter box. Utilities notify the license authority of houssholder changs. That, i don’t like. Kind of Orwellian.
I don’t think thet can track computer based tv but i don’t really want to avoid paying for the BBC. Dumb but hey
My other post notwithstanding: when I was in the UK for a month a few years ago I couldn’t find a single program on the telly I could tolerate let alone would pay 100 pounds a year for.
Is there some sort of cable system there as well (the people I was staying with didn’t have it if there is)?
Mr Sheepshead - yes, there is cable, pretty much nationwide. Telewest (who own Cable London) and NTL are the big players. Satellite TV took off a few years back in a much bigger way, though (WAG: probably due to the easier installation in built-up areas), and digital TV is on the move now. I can’t imagine going back to this time last year, when I only had network TV.
London_Calling - did you see the adverts they placed in the tube? For those of you not familiar, they used examples of non-license payers they’d identified as a scare tactic - it was quite intimidating seeing these enormous white-on-black posters on your way to work, the only content being a message like “Three houses on Queen’s Crescent NW5 do not have TV licenses.”
Just out of interest, over what period of time was this? I can understand one evening when there was nothing watchable, but overall the quality of our TV is pretty good, IMHO.
Matt, yes i saw them. Thought they did what they were supposed to do extremely well. Really brought it home. Very clever and not a little intimidating !
Around here, we go out of our way to watch British television programs. Hmmm… should we watch a rerun of Keeping Up Appearances or Veronica’s Closet? Not much of a decision…
I also agree with the idea of the public paying for the public channel. I think it’s quite reasonable, and certainly better than watching PBS plead for money all of the time.
I am disappointed that this thread has not turned into a discussion about the second question: LBW laws. I returned here hoping to find questions like “Why can you be out LBW not playing a shot if the ball pitches outside off stump, but not if it pitches outside leg?” but alas.
Just to clear up an earlier point: Australia does not have a TV licence system.
On the quality of UK television: there have been a lot of great programmes, but none of them are ever on when you are watching. Dinnerladies, Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones etc. ran for about a dozen episodes over two or three years.
First off, I don’t see how the BBC and PBS differ that much. There are commercial advertisements on PBS but they are more along the lines of “this program is sponsored by so-and-so” and then maybe a 10 or 20 second blurb about the company. They all happen before or after the programs and do not interrupt the programs themselves, which can be up to 2 hours long. The quality is certainly similar on PBS to that on the BBC because some of the programs shown on PBS originate from the BBC. Of course PBS doesn’t have American based comedies equivalent to Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, but I just assumed it was because American comedy tends to be either raunchier than the British shows and ends up on premium channels (The Larry Sanders Show or Arli$$ are examples) or more mundane and ends up on network TV.
Second off, can someone move to England and bring their TV sets into the country? I mean would a TV bought somewhere other than England be allowed into the country without modifications and if so would the detectors work on the set?
Channel 4 (the “alternative” independent British TV channel) has just been showing the test against Zimbabwe (England win cricket match shock!).
They’ve got a great new thing where they highlight the line in red and then fade the batsman out when they’re showing replays of calls for LBW. It looks like the batsman is translucent and you can see the wicket behind him. It’s really cool.
Mmm translucent batsmen. Sweet, I guess we’ll get that next summer - we just had the stump-to-stump zone this season. I’m waiting 'til they make David Shepherd translucent, now we have the technology.
