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TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

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Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#211

Post by flower-giraffe »

I think the funding and governance (by Royal Charter) of the BBC have historically provided a huge benefit to society in the UK.

Advertising free children’s TV (and radio) may have delayed the onset or rampant consumerism fuelled by commercial TV elsewhere.

The BBC microcomputer project is arguably the origin of ARM CPU’s.

Initially the license fee was for radios, I can’t find a reference but I remember being told as a child that politicians saw the risks of radio propaganda and legislated to mandate broadcast media to be politically unbiased .

It’s interesting seeing suggestions on the recent threads about EU funding for a WhatsApp alternative - perhaps the license fee could also fund the infrastructure for something like signal.

What is absolutely clear from history is commercial media outlets fuel political bias, and it seems to be increasingly damaging to society.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_...

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#212

Post by bb123 »

bergstromm466 wrote: post #209
haspok wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the UK there is content on TV worthy of watching (I got addicted to snooker while there, also some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole"), also, when I moved overseas they paid back the licence fee for the remaining part of the year, no questions asked. Now I'm in Austria and the "content" on TV channels is just ridiculous. Targeted at 70+ pensioners, but why should I pay for t…

> some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" The show that demonizes, humiliates and dehumanizes working class people by filming them being evicted?

> > some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole"

> The show that demonizes, humiliates and dehumanizes working class people by filming them being evicted?

The show that highlights, amplifies and prioritises the voices of working class people by filming them being evicted?

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#213

Post by saberdancer »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #119
lqet wrote: post #38

> The United Kingdom is somewhat unique in the world for requiring those households which view broadcast television to purchase a licence for the privilege. I know at least three countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) which do the same (edit: according the Wikipedia [0], such a fee exists in basically every European country, Japan, Israel, South Korea and Namibia). In Germany, the situation changed a few years…

The TV fee exists everywhere, but usually if you have the cable, you pay; if you don't pay, you are cut off and that's the end of story.

This is not a fee for the cable provider. This is a fee you pay regardless of whether you consume public channels or not.

In some countries, the mere existence of a TV or radio in your household means you have to pay. These are publicly broadcast channels.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#214

Post by bipson »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #204
bipson wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, at least in Austria and Germany the government cannot simply change the TV license fee "just because". Of course they ultimately can, but it is not that easy. It still makes a huge difference if money is distributed through the hands of the government, or dedicated 1:1.

This is a political issue and political issues are debated in Parliament in any case, and that includes the budget. It's no more easy to cut funding if it comes from the general budget rather than from a ring-fenced dedicated tax, and ultimately people will decide what they want when it's elections time (and I can tell you that the majority of people in the UK are very attached to the BBC). This applies for the UK bu…

Oh, you haven't been following Austrian politics in the last 10 years it seems.

- Parties says x in elections, that doesn't mean they will do x.

- Some parties/politicians will use every possible way to force public stations to suit their needs - regardless of what people think. Most people will never know - they just consume TV, radio or tabloids and believe everything they hear/read.

- If you don't institutionalize independence, it is gone.

- People in Germany and even more so in Austria have no idea how valuable public stations are. In Austria in particular it is a growing trend to criticize and even ridicule public stations - and this sentiment was gladly picked up and fueled by populists. They regularly demand that ORF is defunded - simply because they cannot control their unfavorable reporting on them - and they would like to. They were in the last government and they put "their guys" in every possible position to ensure control. They are still there and undermining the principles from within, trying to slowly destroy the ORF as a whole - either from incompetence or malice, who knows?

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#215

Post by croon »

hnlmorg wrote: post #185
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of those shows because they are cheap to make. In reality the BBC's funding has been squeezed for years, largely for political reasons. The current government would love to kill it completely but they can't do that directly.

A lot of those shows aren't BBC though. Take that list in question: - Taskmaster: Channel 4 (originally Dave. In fact before that it was a Edinburgh Fringe Festival show written by "little" Alex Horne) - Would I Lie To You: BBC - 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown: Channel 4 (interestingly it's a spin off of "8 out of 10 Cats" which was C4's sort of version of "Have I Got News For You" but C4 did an anniversary series o…

To be fair Channel 4 is kinda sorta BBC too. At least it's owned by UK Government Investments.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#216

Post by jonathanstrange »

haspok wrote: post #91
lqet wrote: post #38

> The United Kingdom is somewhat unique in the world for requiring those households which view broadcast television to purchase a licence for the privilege. I know at least three countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) which do the same (edit: according the Wikipedia [0], such a fee exists in basically every European country, Japan, Israel, South Korea and Namibia). In Germany, the situation changed a few years…

At least in the UK there is content on TV worthy of watching (I got addicted to snooker while there, also some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole"), also, when I moved overseas they paid back the licence fee for the remaining part of the year, no questions asked. Now I'm in Austria and the "content" on TV channels is just ridiculous. Targeted at 70+ pensioners, but why should I pay for t…

BBC is awesome, their news is very good and they produce some of the best series in the world. It's a shame that they have split up BBC UK and BBC International so strictly and do everything they can to lock all BBC UK offerings to citizens of the UK. It infuriates me that I'm redirected from bbc.co.uk to bbc.com and are being displayed something else than people in the UK. If I go to bbc.co.uk, I do that to find out what Brits are seeing.

My girlfriend would gladly pay for being able to access BBC UK series, but that's apparently impossible. They've made some horrible contracts with BBC International that seem to prohibit that. It makes no sense that she has to resort to illegal streaming even though she'd love to be a paying customer.

Another problem is also that BBC International creates and distributes US productions that are far below their normal standards. So if you're looking for BBC nature documentaries, for instance, you have to manually sort out all those trashy international productions that are like National Geographic commercials. As I've said, it's a shame.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#217

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

simonh wrote: post #82
offtop5 wrote: post #3

Pretty sure this was outted as fake. The idea of a van watching you is enough for many to change their behavior

They were a real thing. When an old style TV amplifies the TV signal and feeds it to the CRT tube, it leaks a lot of the boosted signal. I think the rumour that the vans were a fake was probably because they only ever had a few and it was mostly a propaganda show, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. Intelligence agencies used receivers to snoop in on CRT computer monitor signals and could re-generate the display…

>> When an old style TV amplifies the TV signal and feeds it to the CRT tube, it leaks a lot of the boosted signal. I think the rumour that the vans were a fake was probably because they only ever had a few and it was mostly a propaganda show, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.

Just because the technology exists, doesn't mean the BBC actually used it. For one thing, it would have been far cheaper to put out the word that the vans are on the streets and patrolling, than to actually buy them, equip them and staff them with trained personel that could operate the devices.

Alternatively, perhaps a few of those vans really did exist and the rest was smoke and mirrors- rumours, fake vans without any active technology, etc.

Note that the reason I'm finding this likely is that the TV Licensing people are known for using psychological warfare tactics. For instance, I don't watch TV [1] and yet I periodically receive threatening letters from the TV licensing authority telling me that if I'm found to watch TV without a license I'll be fined, etc. Clearly, they send those letters to all addresses in the UK that don't have a license, under the assumption that most addresses without a license actually need one and that by sending out threatening letters en masse they will scare some of those shirkers into compliance- regardless of how many people who don't actually watch TV they end up threatening in the process. I've also seen some really startling public campaigns with posters showing bullseyes on houses, creepy slogans about being watched and so on.

Their tactics are a veritable nuisance and their mass mailing campaigns may or may not have the effect they want, but they sure have the effect of bothering random, uninvolved people with threatening government spam.

_____________

[1] Er, well. I do occasionally watch TV shows, or rather clips thereof- on youtube. But that's not covered by the licensing. You need a license if you're watching TV programmes as they are being broadcast. So for example, I had a TV set for a few years that I used exclusively with a PS2 and I didn't need a license for it- but I'm pretty sure that if I had ever been visited by one of the TV licensing agents, I'd have been forced to pay anyway. How exactly do you prove that you have a TV set but don't watch TV? Most modern houses have aerial plugs - mine sure does. The only thing that really stopped me from connecting the TV set I had to the aerial was that I basically dislike TV. How do you prove that to an agent hell-bent on collecting?

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#218

Post by IanCal »

simonh wrote: post #82
offtop5 wrote: post #3

Pretty sure this was outted as fake. The idea of a van watching you is enough for many to change their behavior

They were a real thing. When an old style TV amplifies the TV signal and feeds it to the CRT tube, it leaks a lot of the boosted signal. I think the rumour that the vans were a fake was probably because they only ever had a few and it was mostly a propaganda show, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. Intelligence agencies used receivers to snoop in on CRT computer monitor signals and could re-generate the display…

The solution built in R&D (as far as the rumour goes) was much simpler. There were only a few channels (typically 4) and this would have been all analog broadcast. The much simpler signal that TVs "leak" is light.

So look at the pattern of changing colours through curtains, and compare to a TV in the van with something to diffuse the light over the top.

Of course, the even simpler approach is to tell people you can do this and just send around / threaten to send around random vans.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#219

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

simonh wrote: post #82
offtop5 wrote: post #3

Pretty sure this was outted as fake. The idea of a van watching you is enough for many to change their behavior

They were a real thing. When an old style TV amplifies the TV signal and feeds it to the CRT tube, it leaks a lot of the boosted signal. I think the rumour that the vans were a fake was probably because they only ever had a few and it was mostly a propaganda show, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. Intelligence agencies used receivers to snoop in on CRT computer monitor signals and could re-generate the display…

They were fake. It would be extremely difficult on most streets and impossible in virtually all tower blocks to triangulate an exact location to a single house/flat.

And the design was ridiculous. A working detector doesn't need to look anything like an aerial stuck on top of a minivan.

And the only record of them being used in a prosecution is for optical detection of combined RGB. Plus some handwaving. Not RF.

So they were pretty much a psy-op.

It's relevant that the license fee collectors - who belong to Capita, one of those curious quasi-private-with-state-support companies that buzz around the British government like flies - rely almost entirely on self-incrimination for prosecutions.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#220

Post by bergstromm466 »

bb123 wrote: post #212
bergstromm466 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" The show that demonizes, humiliates and dehumanizes working class people by filming them being evicted?

> > some quite interesting shows like "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" > The show that demonizes, humiliates and dehumanizes working class people by filming them being evicted? The show that highlights, amplifies and prioritises the voices of working class people by filming them being evicted?

> The show that highlights, amplifies and prioritises the voices of working class people by filming them being evicted?

Thank you for pointing this out. I don't know British TV well so I wrongly assumed it was another show, because it sounded like it. The show I originally thought OP was referring to is called 'Can't Pay? We'll Take it Away!'. It is bile. That is what my above comment is really responding to.

It's sad to see people actually laughing at others' misfortune such as this youtuber, who has made a compilation of 'Craziest Freakouts Ever!' with clips from 'Can't Pay? We'll Take it Away!': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0kO9TA96h4

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