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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

#421

Post by notahacker »

visarga wrote: post #375
jonathanstrange wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

BBC also sat on their 10 million hour archive of media while the internet, social networks, Wikipedia and blogs went ahead commenting, sharing, indexing, discussing and remixing other sources of content. They cared so much for their copyrights that their media became unconnected and unused.

The BBC and developed the web based on-demand video platform that inspired Netflix back in 2005 and operates the world's most visited news website. They did this despite having fixed funding, charter obligations not to advertise around their content and royalty obligations to producers.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#422

Post by Mauricebranagh »

seanalltogether wrote: post #401
saberdancer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point of this license fee in this day and age? Everyone has a TV, so everyone pays the license fee. Wouldn't it be simpler to just use a part of the taxes already collected to go to BBC. My problem with this type of license fee collection is that it bring forward a number of costs associated with it that could be removed if it went directly from taxes and that today everyone has TV so it doesn't really "t…

I've brought this argument forward many times since I moved to the UK, and everyone I've talked to hates the idea of turning the fee into a general tax. It's a weird refusal that I genuinely can't understand as someone not born here. Everyone seems happy enough with the idea of paying tax for public libraries or parks or other social institutions they may never use because it benefits society, but bring up the tv lic…

They don't trust the government

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#423

Post by lotsofpulp »

audunw wrote: post #286
philwelch wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point, why don’t they just have the government fund the television networks from tax revenue rather than effectively levying a poll tax earmarked for broadcasters?

It's not good for the government to have too much direct control over state media. They executive branch should not be able to change the budget from year to year on their own, since they can "punish" state media if they don't say things the government likes. Using tax revenue would generally give the executive branch power to set or at least propose the budget. When Norway recently moved to tax funding state media,…

Any payment the government forces you to make is a tax, in my opinion. And I see no difference in the “government” forcing you to pay a TV license versus bundling it in tax revenue. As you wrote, the same government can just preclude that amount of tax revenue from being altered by the “executive branch”, if that is the goal.

But otherwise, the “government” can always alter the tv license fee, or the tax. It’s always under their control, and changing its label doesn’t do anything.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#424

Post by lotsofpulp »

caspper69 wrote: post #413
lotsofpulp wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just sounds like paperwork. Legislation forcing people to pay a “TV license” and legislation forcing people to pay more tax and then transferring those tax funds to the BBC is effectively the same thing. Except the latter is more efficient.

Despite your feelings on the issue, the difference is quite stark. Relying on allocations in yearly budgets, subject to the political whims of lawmakers, is clearly a different animal altogether.

Why can’t the law be written so that the allocation can’t be changed (as easily)?

Even right now, the politicians can choose to enact legislation to modify or remove the tv license fee.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#425

Post by antihero »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #400
saberdancer wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the point of this license fee in this day and age? Everyone has a TV, so everyone pays the license fee. Wouldn't it be simpler to just use a part of the taxes already collected to go to BBC. My problem with this type of license fee collection is that it bring forward a number of costs associated with it that could be removed if it went directly from taxes and that today everyone has TV so it doesn't really "t…

> Wouldn't it be simpler to just use a part of the taxes already collected to go to BBC. That would make the BBC dependent on the government for its revenue, which definitely isn't desirable. The current system, where the BBC collects its own revenue under the authority of a royal charter, is intended to help insulate it from political interference.

Yet they appoint right-wing Tory donors as their chairmen.

https://bylinetimes.com/2021/01/06/new-bbc-chairman-richard-...

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#426

Post by Mauricebranagh »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #319
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…

Benefits Britain is C5, not BBC, so it's not funded by licence fees. Indeed very few programmes appear to be made by the BBC. It seems like what happened/happens is that producers form their own private company, do the work for the BBC but the public don't get to keep the benefit of the work paid for the benefit gets locked away to provide private gains. Long running programmes are now made by third parties when they…

That was a political choice to increase competition it also means that more £ goes to the talent.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#427

Post by lotsofpulp »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #417
lotsofpulp wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true. I guess as an adult, I feel like I notice it more when the writing / photography blatantly and inorganically bring logos and certain products to the forefront. A family member’s kids were watching a Christmas movie on Netflix, and while I wasn’t watching it, something jarring hit my ears. In the middle of the movie, Santa names the brand and model of a car, and then starts listing its specs as he gets in…

Pay for placement is common in the USA and in films also why you don't often see baddies using apple products.

There’s placement, and then there’s altering the storyline and photography of a scene to achieve the goal of advertising a product.

For example, there’s a difference in someone drinking a can of Coke, versus someone spending 30 seconds talking about how they love Coke, and adjusting the camera angles so that the Coke logo is always front and center.

It’s possible to do product placement that doesn’t take you out of the story. But recent stuff beats you over the head with it in ways that are inconsistent with normal behavior and it’s jarring, takes you out of the moment, and I have no idea how people tolerate it.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#428

Post by ajsnigrutin »

> The United Kingdom is somewhat unique in the world for requiring those households which view broadcast television to purchase a licence for the privilege

Not really, we have that in Slovenia too.

In the past, you could avoid it by claiming you had no tv (and a grey-legal area of letting them verify). Then they expanded and added the "radio" part, where you paid less if you have a radio (and no tv), including car radio.

Then they added internet streaming, and expanded the definition of "tv" to "any device, capable of viewing streamed content" (pc, smartphone), so if you have a smartphone, you have to pay for tv, just because you have a device capable of watching a stream.

There have been many calls to just encrypt the over-the-air broadcasts, and create usernames and passwords for paying customers for streaming, but they prefer the "catch-all" definitions of "tv", so they can collect monthly subscriptions from pretty much every household in the country.

Our private tv stations are not much better... the most viewed one, did a nasty deal with the cable/iptv operators, wanting either a lot of money for their tv channels as a searate option, or less money if their tv stations are put into "basic"(=cheapest, smaller) cable packages, so they forced a price increase for every cable/iptv subscriber and there's no way to cancel just their channels.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#429

Post by Chris2048 »

saberdancer wrote: post #255
boffinism wrote: post #128

The BBC is currently dedicating hours of airtime a day to educational content to match our primary and secondary curricula because the schools are shut and lots of kids can't access online provisions. And still people complain about the licence fee in terms of whether or not they enjoy BBC gameshows...

What is the point of this license fee in this day and age? Everyone has a TV, so everyone pays the license fee. Wouldn't it be simpler to just use a part of the taxes already collected to go to BBC. My problem with this type of license fee collection is that it bring forward a number of costs associated with it that could be removed if it went directly from taxes and that today everyone has TV so it doesn't really "t…

I don't have a TV, nor do I need one. Would I get a rebate?

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#430

Post by eplanit »

scotty79 wrote: post #390
flower-giraffe wrote: post #211

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…

I wonder if people will ever notice how socially and psychologically toxic is advertisement business and regulate it stringently.

Less toxic than law enforcement knocking on my door to see if I have a damn television. I'd rather reign in authoritarianism.
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