TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England • Hacker News Board

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#531

Post by _slyo » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 2:55 AM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #493

afavour wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regularly see the BBC criticised by both sides for being one sided. I’m not saying that’s a get out of jail free card but from your comment I genuinely don’t know which side you come down on, which surely says something. I don't mean to dismiss the complaint. Public media news is weird: it's funded by the government, but it should criticise the government. There's a tension there. But looking at the US news landsca…

I have read across the spectrum for years in the UK, the BBC is not especially biased, maybe a little liberal and it ignores poorer people, but almost all media does that in the UK. But the histrionics frim the Tories and Momentum about the BBC is wildly misplaced. In comparison I never really watched the US "news" until the recent US election, occasionally watching a bit of CNN/ABC/Fox News. But I've been watching i…

I agree that CNN and Fox are both disgustingly biased.

I appreciate BBC's journalistic standards, but I think they are the exception rather than the norm. I think Poland's case is more typical:

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/04/951063118/polands-government-...

Whether privately or publicly owned, the mitigation of media bias requires constant effort, education, and integrity.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#532

Post by mk89 » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 3:17 AM UTC

LeanderK wrote: post #354

CodesInChaos wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they can pretend their state TV is independent from the state.

The german state TV is independent, neutral and does very good journalistic job. I don't know how on earth they could be criticised to be a propaganda outlet for the state. I personally know someone who works for the journalistic side of the state TV and I can assure you that he has all the journalistic freedom he needs. That being said, i fell like the state TV is the opposite. Only neutral news, facts without much…

You can "easily" manufacture consent by selecting what goes online and what doesn't. What is said and what is not. This is somehow also very powerful.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#533

Post by Osiris » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 4:30 AM UTC

comprev wrote: post #340

Osiris wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe that's one reason some TV manufactures have started removing OTA tuners. My Visio is not actually labeled as a Television, I believe it's a home theater display, because it has no TV tuner.

Which model do you have?

I have a 2018 M series Visio.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#534

Post by sjwright » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 5:51 AM UTC

rtkwe wrote: post #404

sjwright wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you could make it mandatory for a voucher good for 1 year of license to be sold alongside every TV. You can then credit that voucher to your household account. (If you bought more than one new TV per year, your TV license account would be in perpetual credit. I don't see that as a problem.)

That's just a tax with extra steps of dealing with the voucher. The average replacement timespan is 7-8 years so what's the point of including it in the first year?

Increases compliance rate, reduces losses from non-compliance, improves monitoring/statistics around non-compliance.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#535

Post by musicale » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 5:56 AM UTC

ouid wrote: post #499

afavour wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly agreed. Having lived in the US for a good number of years now I can see how the idea of vans roaming looking for TV viewers is baffling, but the public TV offering by the BBC, while definitely not perfect, is miles ahead of both the public and network offerings on US TV (though credit to the likes of PBS and NPR for doing miraculous work with a fraction of the budget!). I even got my start in computing from…

Then pay for it with taxes on sales of television sets themselves.

I suppose phones and laptops qualify as television sets.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#536

Post by comex » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 7:57 AM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #510

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

At last from an American perspective, that seems like a technicality, and it uses government enforcement tools. The US funds the Corporation for Public Broadcasting directly, and even under Trump, there wasn't much pressure around changing its funding--I guess defunding Sesame Street looks bad. Of course, public broadcast stations turn into panhandlers once every few months, so it's not without its faults.

For some definition of “wasn’t much pressure”. All four of Trump’s yearly budget requests zeroed out the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, though Congress wasn’t interested.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#537

Post by reallydontask » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 8:39 AM UTC

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…

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

I find this statement hard to square with the make up of the economy of this country and the rampant consumerism that seems to exist.

We seem to have taken the biggest hit to the economy by covid because our economy depends so much on rampant consumerism (I'm obviously simplifying)

This is not to say that I think ad free TV is bad, quite the opposite.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#538

Post by andrewaylett » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 9:02 AM UTC

cortic wrote: post #420

mhh__ wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is to make it harder to fiddle with the BBC budget

The idea is to make the poor and working classes pay for it, being regressive everyone pays the same, taxes are progressive, the more you earn the more you pay. Government set the licence fee and legislation around it every 5 or 6 years. The last renewal put government appointed editors into the BBC in exchange for a change in Law from 'watch live BBC channels = you have to pay' to 'watch live non-BBC channels = you…

It has always been the case that watching any broadcast TV as it's broadcast requires a license.

Now it's also the case that you need a license to use BBC's streaming platform, iPlayer, to watch video on demand.

Note that "live" isn't the qualifier -- so long as you're not watching a feed of something that's being broadcast you're OK.

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#539

Post by andrewaylett » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 9:33 AM UTC

vaduz wrote: post #487

Chris2048 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can apply for exemption [0] - needs to be reconfirmed every 2 years and sometimes more often if TVL/Capita thinks there 'might' have been changes you did not report (e.g. you subscribed to a service that participates in their reporting scheme - NowTV is one of the providers that reports their customers). You pay nothing if you qualify for one of the four exemption bases. Note: if the exemption lapses without a ne…

Note that it's not a _legal_ exemption -- there's no requirement in law to register that you _don't_ have a TV, but they'd prefer you did so they can target their harassment more effectively.

I've given up telling them -- it's less effort to drop their letters in the bin, and appears no less effective at stopping new ones arriving. That was after being "visited" a few years back and the goon trying the classic "if you've nothing to hide".

Re: TV detector vans once prowled the streets of England

#540

Post by mattlutze » Wed, Jan 20, 2021, 10:45 AM UTC

account42 wrote: post #334

mattlutze wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public broadcasters in Germany aren't propaganda arms of the government and are generally respected across political affiliation, except perhaps by the sort of folks that think AfD has the right approach. They may exhibit some editorial lean ( https://www.dw.com/en/a-dual-broadcasting-system/a-435426 ), but from everything I've seen not even to the level that folks in the US complain about CNBC or Fox News. Germa…

> except perhaps by the sort of folks that think AfD has the right approach Ah right, everyone that disagrees must be one of those people so their opinion doesn't matter. > They may exhibit some editorial lean More than "some". > CNBC or Fox News Those are corporations that noone is not forced to fund if you disagree with them. > Just generally, independent journalism is important Except you can't give certain organi…

> Ah right, everyone that disagrees must be one of those people so their opinion doesn't matter. > More than "some".

This sounds like disgruntled opinion over having to pay 18 EUR/month for something you don't watch.

Please feel free to put something more substantial behind your snappy retorts. The studies and research I've read indicates that the people mostly trust and appreciate the balance in German public broadcasting, and most disgruntled with public broadcasting in Germany are on the radical sides. The second bit is more universally supported by psychological research indicating that the average person wants to watch stuff that confirms their biases.

> Except you can't give certain organizations a unique monopoly to collect fees from everyone and then call it independent with a straight face.

You're perverting the meaning of monopoly here, I think. There's a publicly funded infrastructure for broadcast programming, as well as privately funded sources of programming. ZDF and ARD don't have exclusive right to broadcast in any market in Germany as far as I know?

The publicly funded infrastructure includes representative oversight mechanisms from political and community sources, which provide a far more robust mechanism for neutrality checking vs the programming decisions of a profit-motivated private organization.

> Finally, unlike taxes

Means testing is a fantastic point, I whole-heartedly agree that statutory funding structures like this shouldn't overburden any slice of the population.