A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK.
Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.
replies(19):
Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.
I think there also were some large cases where a company who owned a car fleet had to pay for the car radios.
the absurd part is restricting that tax to only people who watch TV, and trying to do surveillance and enforcement to determine whether or not somebody is eligible for a TV tax.
[1] Big parts of our public television suck. But ARTE is awesome!
* Borgen
* Occupied
* Mit offenen Karten
* Karambolage
* …
I found out that in my country you can have a third-party, approved technician come to your house to disable the tuner portion of your TV so that you would not have to pay any television license. Around this time analog broadcasting was already being phased out or had already completely shut down in my country. And although some kind of digital broadcasting over air-waves exists to replace it, most people do not use that. Instead, you'll typically buy a subscribtion via cable or via IPTV or via sattelite, all of which come with a separate box that plugs into your TV via HDMI instead of relying on the tuner in your TV, even if that tuner can decode digitally broadcast radio signals. So the tuner in the TV was not serving much of a purpose anyway, even if I'd ever want to use the TV as a TV.
I paid a technician a bit of money to come disable the tuner for me in my newly bought 55" LED TV. I was imagining that he'd be opening the TV and carefully removing some essential part. What he actually did was take a plier and break the input for the tuner and then put a small piece of tape over it. Simple solutions, I guess. Then, I think I also got them to write a letter for me confirming that the tuner had been disabled.
It cost me a little bit of money, but not too much. Less than paying the TV license fee for that and subsequent years I was staying in that house anyway.
These days, I still have the TV. I put it in my grandfather's house a few years ago so he could use it. He already pays TV license fee and has a digital receiver. It has HDMI out which goes in to the TV. So he is not inconvenienced by the broken tuner input of the TV either, just like I expected back then that this disabling of the tuner would never be a problem even if I ever wanted to use it as a TV.
It does seem kind of silly now, that I paid someone to come break the input for a portion of the TV that was never going to be needed even if you wanted to use it as a TV. But I still think it was worth it, and that it saved me from worrying about inspections. Even though no inspection ever happened at the house either back in the days where I was using it as a monitor for my computer.
We have this ridiculous situation where I'm not required to pay (so I don't), yet the TV licensing people are allowed (required?) to send me junk mail week after week trying to trick me into thinking I do need to pay them.
"Any services from the BBC" means any. TV broadcast, radio broadcast, or internet streaming. And because the actual intention was to make everyone pay, the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one. If you have a computer and the Internet, you could receive internet streaming.
And then you have more stupid rules, like even though they're collecting a tax, they're not tax collectors so they don't have any authority to come into your house, so they invent weird ways to detect if you have a TV or not.
Presumably a left wing government would remove all this stuff and just make it a tax.
> the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one.
That's not true. You're allowed to own equipment capable of receiving licensed broadcasts, all that matters is that you don't.
That's not true, according to https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence.
> You do not need a TV Licence to watch:
> • streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus
> • on-demand TV through services like All 4 and Amazon Prime Video
> • videos on websites like YouTube
> • videos or DVDs
Now I'm forced to pay for old sitcoms, astrology shows, soccer stuff and other useless things I don't watch anyways...
I hate having to pay for distribution licenses for soccer games, but if that ensures continued support for high-quality journalism, so be it.
But it's unheard of (for media[1]) in the US and common in Europe.
[1]The closest thing we have here might be parking passes for state parks, even unpopular ones where free parking would remain mostly empty.
The van soon left after a few days but left a full bottle of yellow liquid. Makes a fun story, but yeah they threaten you a bunch and it's quite sad.
It sounds so farcical now, in our age of ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.