321–330 of 345 posts
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You also get a discount if you're still using a black-and-white TV. https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/t...
Hold on a sec. If your blind you get a 50% discount, but if you have a B&W TV you get a 66% discount? Blind people are being robbed blind...
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"Does this put the BBC at risk of violating anti-peeping-Tom legislation?" Er, you'd have to be more specific. I'm not familiar with that legislation.
In the USA, laws against looking in someone's house on purpose are called "peeping Tom" laws. Generally they specify that it's not a problem if you do not intend to violate anyone's privacy and don't take any steps to improve your sightline; conversely, if you intend to look into someone's house and you take any active measure to do so, you're in violation.
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Not sure about emptying them, but the TVs with coin slots where a thing in the UK: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/methode%2Ftimes... Not for the BBC license though: it was when TVs where expensive (in the 60s and 70s) and so some people could just rent one. Probably sounds alien to US people, but UK was much poorer country, especially in workers areas...
You're right to highlight the point about the UK's former lack of wealth (as it's not obvious), but I was amused by the reference to "workers areas" - presumably "working class areas" as people have worked in pretty much all populated areas of the country since time immemorial.
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It's real. The TV rental companies had a range of approaches, one of which was the very expensive option of a coin operated TV. Another common way to pay was by book and visit the TV rental shop weekly to pay a little. If you had one of the coin ops, chances are your electric and gas were on coin operated meters too - with the landlord of your flat or bedsit setting their own markup on that meter... https://www.tvobs…
>> If you had one of the coin ops, chances are your electric and gas were on coin operated meters too - with the landlord of your flat or bedsit setting their own markup on that meter... Some friends of mine who lived in London had an electricity meter that they had to recharge with cards they got from the corner shop. This was in 2005 or so. Do you know how common this is in London, or the rest of the UK, nowadays?…
As gambiting says they;re often put in if you get behind on bills, but if you have poor credit or move into a flat that already has them I think it can be pretty damn difficult to get off them. Like some utilities make a charge or ask a deposit to get a normal meter put in again, even if that wasn't down to you in the first place.
So if you've haven't got much you tend to lose out 2 or 3 ways.
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I don't know where you moved to, but is the US anything admirable lately? Guess I should cross the UK off the list of places to flee to.
I moved to NZ. Glad to get out of UK's weather and rat race. Went to Hawaii for couple weeks one year ago. Experienced culture shock. NZ is probably best place in the world.
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To be clear, this only applies to television that is paid for by the license (BBC etc, including streaming via iPlayer). I have a television and use it only to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, and am thus not required to pay the license. Which goes to show how ridiculous these vans are, since they can't tell where you're getting the content you're watching.
This is incorrect advice that could get someone convicted. A licence is required if you watch live TV on any channel. See: https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ95
https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ95 is pretty clear that I have to pay.
Why, ethically, should I be obliged to pay TVLA (and therefor the BBC) for something they didn't create or facilitate?
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I don't begrudge the TV licence too much. I used to, and then I moved to Ireland - where I pay a roughly equivalent amount for a roughly equivalent licence, which funds RTÉ (and tg4? unclear) with nowhere near the same results. And still ads. It turns out the better half of Europe has TV licences in one form or another - but for some reason, we never hear about them. When the UK has to fund a state broadcaster, it's…
>> It turns out the better half of Europe has TV licences in one form or another - but for some reason, we never hear about them. It's probably because in the rest of Europe national broadcasters don't badger you to pay a license even if you don't actually own a TV set. In the UK, I get threatening red-lettered envelopes every few years- because it's easier to harass me by mail than to try and figure out whether I wa…
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The ads were hugely dystopian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NmdUcmLFkw I am an ex-pat and as an adult I am have become quite disillusioned with the UK and glad to have gotten out a decade ago. I miss nothing about England except my friends, and I'd feel sorry for them, but they all seem mostly happy with life. Paying a license to have a TV (and it's assumed you must watch TV), opt in porn on the internet, CCTV ev…
I hardly ever watch broadcast TV, but I don't mind paying the licence fee for the BBC website and radio stations. There are plenty of things to dislike about the UK, but that seems like an odd list of things to highlight. The porn opt-in thing has been pushed back for a year or two and will be quietly shelved when it's realised it's unworkable. The supposedly omnipresent CCTV invariably seems to have been lost or tur…
Actually it's 'indefinitely postponed now, after it was realised about the end of June that it was a violation of EU law (also, it was May's baby, and she's gone, Boris is a pro-porn kinda guy).
How about a small flat fee everybody pays to sustain the national broadcaster? Whether they watch it or not is not relevant. It's a nation-wide service at their disposal. Either it's worth it to have, like a dam or a highway system or whatever, and it's ok for people to pay for it in taxes, or it's not, and it should close.
That's the solution in Germany since a few years. It is called Rundfunkbeitrag and costs 20€ per month per flat.