Government defeated over TV licence fee decriminalisation
- Thread starter Kronos
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How did you come to this assumption when there is so much evidence to the contrary?
We're talking about entertainment not a necessary part of social structure.
And while that may be the system at present surely the point of this thread is to debate it rather than 'take it or leave it.'
£5 a week might not be a lot to you or me but why pay for something a person has no interest in? It's perfectly reasonable that someone might want to watch the free television made and opt out of paying for the BBC - equally someone might rather put their £5 a week towards a basic sky package so they could watch Sky Atlantic - the nearest equivalent we have to HBO, currently they don't have that choice ; I feel, they should.
You're going to struggle to convince me that there are people who would genuinely need the £3 a week that a TV license costs, who would use it to fund a Sky subscription. If you can afford a Sky subscription then you can afford the TV License. If you can't afford the TV License then you aren't being forced to watch TV, so don't.
If you can't see how the removal of the TV License would push the price of your subscription services up then you're deluded.
If you can't see how the removal of the TV License would push the price of your subscription services up then you're deluded.
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Ah, that might explain why it's been all change in Ambridge.
Why should everyone who watches to be forced to pay for an unnecessary entertainment service they may not want? It's about freedom of choice, in what way do you feel abolition of the licence fee would increase the cost of subscription services ?
You don't pay for others peoples children's education....you pay for your own and your own children's education through the taxes you pay (hopefully) as an adult. If you feel that state funded education is an injustice you have a very skewed idea of justice quite frankly.
As explained hundreds of times in this thread, it doesn't just pay for an entertainment service. If the BBC went commercial then in the short-term you'd instantly have more advertising slots available, so they would be worth less to advertisers. This would affect Sky's revenue so they would either push up prices to compensate, or reduce the amount they spend which in turn would reduce the quality of output.
There's also all the longer term cost increases like Sky not being able to take on BBC trained staff, the lack of competition offering no reason for them not to hike subscription costs etc.
If you're all for freedom of choice and the free market then you should know what reduced competition does.
That's actually a good point. Do you need a TV licence to watch a live stream on Youtube? Such as a Apple reveal event?
If you have no interest in it then don't pay it. If you're not watching live TV then you don't need to pay. IIRC a small portion of the licence fee also goes to help the other terrestrial broadcasters broadcast their channels, it's not just the BBC that it's paying for.
If you only want to watch Sky Atlantic then get Now TV, you won't have to pay the licence and that £3 a week can go towards that subscription. You do have that choice.
With the advent of so many streaming channels (and I include I played in that) there really is little reason to be buying a TV licence any more. We still do because the other half insists on watching rubbish daytime TV after she finishes work (but luckily before I get home!).
If you watch some material on NowTV, as it's being broadcast live so to speak you will need a TV licence. The TVL licence doesn't support the other terrestrial broadcasters such as Channel 4. The exception to this is S4C which since 2013 has been funded by the BBC.
http://help.nowtv.com/article/TV-Licence
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I just use catch up services and netflix... no point having a license or regular tv these days. I haven't owned a TV for 18 years now so have saved myself over £2000.
You haven't really thought this through have you?
I dont recall saying the BBC should go to a model funded by advertising? Why couldn't the BBC go commercial and charge - effectively as it does for the licence fee with an encrypted signal - Those that want it pay for it those that don't go without but aren't forced to forgo other broadcasters.
That said if the BBC wanted to fund itself by adverts - then so be it at least it would be a free market. I also find it odd that if the BBC going commercial would so absolutely have a negative impact on the revenue of other broadcasters that they never really seem to rally round to defend the licence fee system? Ive only ever read about them complaining about having to compete in an unfair system.
Why would sky, ( ITV, 4, 5, arquiva or any other company in broadcasting) not be able to take on staff from the BBC anymore - the BBC would still need an train staff just as the BBC takes in staff trained at those commercial companies.
Competition is very important, but i just can't buy into the justification for a system that forces viewers to fund a broadcaster before they are allowed to view any other broadcaster. Yes the BBC and the licence fee funds more than just their TV channels ; but why should someone not have the choice to watch another broadcaster without paying for other BBC services?
The reason the BBC don't is fairly simple.
It is not allowed to.
It's not even allowed to use the BBC name for channels that are funded by anything other than the TVL inside the UK, and doesn't set the level of the TVL.
This ignores a few other facts such as the BBC is a PSB, a PSB by definition cannot be subscription.
It ignores the fact that there are almost no STB and TV's for freeview or freesat that come the ability to decrypts signals, and many don't even have a CAM slot.
It ignores the fact that if you make the BBC a commercial entity you lose all the expensive low viewer and niche content as it doesn't attract enough viewers for a commercial entity, you also lose things like Life on Mars which was IIRC offered to pretty much all the other UK broadcasters who said "it's too risky" or "too expensive for the risk".
So goodbye to most of the politics programming, the consumer affairs, the health related programming, UK childrens programming, the schools and OU stuff, pretty much all of BBC4, not to mention the local news (there is a reason ITV dumped it's news channel and Sky doesn't do much/any local news).
It also ignores the fact that doing so would mean you would need to either find some other method to fund all the BBC radio services, or replace many tens of millions of receivers with new devices that can decrypt an encrypted radio signal (when new cars often don't even come with a DAB radio, something that has been around for 10-15+ years, and the curent cost of a new radio for personal use can be a couple of pounds).
Even the US has a PSB, albeit a very very badly underfunded one, and that's in a country where there is far more potential for variety of commercially funded broadcasts (the simple size of the US means that they can fund more new content, although it does tend to mean putting up with approaching 20 minutes of adverts an hour).
If I could drop the BBC and pay the left over I would.
I still want live TV but not the BBC.
I see no justification this can't happen. We have the technology and I don't see why you should have to pay for BBC if you don't want to watch it but do want c4 etc
I still want live TV but not the BBC.
I see no justification this can't happen. We have the technology and I don't see why you should have to pay for BBC if you don't want to watch it but do want c4 etc
Just like BBC iPlayer. Most people use Now TV to stream on demand programmes that are not live (such as a lot of the Sky Atlantic stuff).
I'm sure I read somewhere the TV licence also pays in part for the upkeep transmission system (antenna etc) that is used by all broadcasters. As you say it doesn't go to subsidising any of the actual broadcasters however.
Which is funded by the TVL. If you remove the BBC funding stream, in all likelihood you will end up with a very limited iPlayer service, more akin to ITV player than Now TV. The same if people didn't subscribe to Sky, their services would suffer as a result.
The TV and radio transmission infrastructure is privately owned by Arqiva.
IIRC the tVL doesn't pay for the transmitters any more than other broadcasters do, except for things like the secondary/booster transmitters where the numbers served aren't high enough for the other broadcasters to justify paying (in which case it's usually just the PSB mux that gets broadcast which the BBC will often pay the largest share of).
What the BBC does tend to do is a lot of the real world testing for the tech that most of the broadcasters use, things like testing new software and hardware, and IIRC is one of the primary broadcasters that help work out the EU standards (hence the "treasonous" fees the BBC gets paid for it's "pro EU" propaganda*).
I'm not sure about recently, but the BBC has/had a lot of patents for things that we take for granted, everything from ye olde teletext and nicam to early development of digital video recordings.
*AKA the handful of millions the BBC gets paid occasionally for it's part in developing and testing standards to make sure that they work reliably, and don't kill off other services by mistake.
What the BBC does tend to do is a lot of the real world testing for the tech that most of the broadcasters use, things like testing new software and hardware, and IIRC is one of the primary broadcasters that help work out the EU standards (hence the "treasonous" fees the BBC gets paid for it's "pro EU" propaganda*).
I'm not sure about recently, but the BBC has/had a lot of patents for things that we take for granted, everything from ye olde teletext and nicam to early development of digital video recordings.
*AKA the handful of millions the BBC gets paid occasionally for it's part in developing and testing standards to make sure that they work reliably, and don't kill off other services by mistake.