81–90 of 562 posts
The vans were real. I remember one sitting outside my apt in England with the twirling antennae looking for felons who had a TV without paying a license fee.
Pretty sure this was outted as fake. The idea of a van watching you is enough for many to change their behavior
Intelligence agencies used receivers to snoop in on CRT computer monitor signals and could re-generate the display output, I remember watching a TV program where some electrical engineers built a home-grown version and demonstrated how it worked. It was only effective up to about a dozen metres IIRC with their setup, but theoretically could work at longer range with better hardware.
I remember chatting with friends about it because we were playing an espionage RPG at the time so of course we wanted our characters to have access to the tech.
The situation was (is) the same in Germany: There is a fee of about 20EUR/month per household in order to fund the public service broadcasting. And in the last century, these "TV detector vans" also have been a thing in Germany. While the detecting technology can work in theory, it will perform poorly in practice. Think of any dense settling, such as apartment blocks. It will be kind of impossible to determine the ex…
I have said this before and I will say it again...Dear BBC, please allow the rest of the world to pay for a subscription to the iPlayer. Just take my money, really, please?
Geniune question: what is on the BBC that you would want to watch that you can't get elsewhere?
Ireland also requires a TV license for each home. If you have any device _capable_ of receiving a signal you're required to pay.... even if you only use the TV for games consoles or Netflix.
Same in Germany, or at least it used to be that way and somewhat recently they just got rid of the requirement to have a TV. It's just yet another tax. Moving to Germany feels a bit like they pretend to keep "tax rates" low by splitting out various things and making it "not a tax". In the Netherlands I had income tax and that was it, from that the govt just pays development aid and old age money (AOW) as needed. Here…
The vans were real. I remember one sitting outside my apt in England with the twirling antennae looking for felons who had a TV without paying a license fee.
I think the main question is whether the detection technology was real and worked as expected or they were just decoys.
> 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…
You can add France and Japan to the list. In France, they don't go door to door, though, it's only a check box on some tax returns forms. In Japan they do come door to door. I've never heard about "detection vans" in either, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't it make sense to just add the license fee/tax at the source of sale, just like electronic waste recycling fee etc.
When you bought a new TV or video recorder then you used to have to supply your name and address. The selling business had to provide that info to the TV Licensing body by law. This was the mid-90s so it might have changed. I remember paying 300 quid for a VCR and giving them a fake name and address before leaving with my JVC under my arm.
https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/business...
> To encourage compliance, TV Licencing regularly sends sternly worded letters to those who have let their licence lapse or have not purchased one. This is an understatement. It would be fairer to say they constantly spam you with scare mail. > In the event this fails, they may arrange a visit from enforcement officers. That's what they want you to think. In practice it never really happens. Too expensive. Hence the…
This makes me feel bad for the people who actually do need and pay for a TV license since a chunk of that money is wasted on this scum instead of being used to fund the BBC or whatever the license is supposed to fund.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the current theory is they simply look for light leakage. If they see a "flash - 200ms - flash - 400ms - flash - 350ms - flash" pattern leaking through your curtains precisely at the moment the same pattern occurs in a live broadcast they know you're watching.
You say simply, but I think that's much more difficult than just detecting the presence of em noise conforming to a broadcast standard. Anyone that's put an AM radio next to a CRT TV knows it emits em noise. The CRT itself is, to over simplify, a high voltage capacitor. It's one of the most popular devices used to power hobbyist Tesla coils... I don't know why everyone seems to think that just because TVs were "recei…
Here's my TV detection method: look at their windows and see if there's a light flickering pattern that looks like a TV (if behind curtains) or maybe you can see the TV