Truly a perfect mystery. Perhaps at one point letters were expected to be returned, and this feature of the letterhead has been copied over the years without thinking?
The OCR statement is confusing. It speaks of a customer manager trying to pass the buck down the line as quickly as possible
my thought was that they perhaps have to accept returned letters informing them of the lack of a TV at the address, but in a sort of dark pattern they don't specifically say that in the hope that you use one of the other, less administratively expensive options listed in the letter.
It's pretty obvious that they use this OCR system to track sent letters that don't expect a reply as well as forms you return and they've just used the same template in both cases.
Because a returned letter must be associated with an account / account holder to be processed.
Though they knew this information when they sent it to the author, presumably it would be laborious to manually associate the same information with each returned letter (one would have to look it up anyway), so they probably print the data on the letter that may someday be returned, to allow quick lookup in the event it is returned.
It's equivalent to a conversation ID and interface crafted to avoid lookups, making this letter exchange idempotent, which I very much appreciate.
Why it was not requested to be returned is beyond me, but likely all such letters contain this.
Likeliest situation is all their stationary destined for send outs have the line; and in situations where the line serves no purpose it does no harm to leave it: so there is little use in having additional process around completely blank stock.
They could have told him that though if it's the case, and the mystery would be solved. But there obviously wasn't any desire (or more charitably - time) on their end to really look into the reasoning or even understand the question.
----
Edit: I will share what I think is a nice a little counterpoint story here, from a business that is clearly still interested in understanding. I sent Lego an email a while ago:
I'm just wondering if you're able to tell me what the
tune is that the Lego Primo musical camel plays in set
number 2007. It's a set from 1998. We have the camel and
it plays a nice tune, but no-one seems to know what it is!
They replied a day later:
Thanks for getting in touch with us.
This is a really really really and I mean really interesting
question you got there for us. I have checked with all the
resources I have and come to a possible conclusion.
The Musical Camel – which in Denmark actually is called
‘PRIMO Dromedar'. 1st theory is that, One DUPLO-designer
says that the melody was composed by the designer that
created the camel but no one remembers the name who created
the Musical Camel. Another thing is, one of the engineer once
had a musical box that had the same melody but he is no
longer with us anymore and cannot provide us the answer.
I am so sorry that, at the end of the day I cannot provide
you with any name to the title. But I hope the facts can
make a good story for you to tell your friends.
I cannot find it, but I once sent an email to johnnie walker to ask for the music for what is arguably the best ad I ever saw (except for think different). They correctly answered, though the answer was the music is original and copyrighted, and thus I could not get it.
Hadn't seen either, but man.... That's a good one. Simple idea, great writing, excellent production, superb acting (I love Robert Carlyle).
I've always respected Johnnie Walker, but thought their offerings are overpriced for what they are (brand-name premium, I guess). However, I just discovered Johnnie Walker Double Black, and: wow. It's a nice, smoky whisky for $30-something a bottle. I don't know anything else I like better in that price-band. It's my new "table whisky". Great stuff.
The problem is there’s no “they”. Just an underpaid government contractor manning the email inbox, asking around “hey why do the letters say this?” and responding with the bare minimum.
I have a wonderful memory of eating a snickers bar with my Dad as a kid, and deciding to call the comment line (1-800 number) on the wrapper. I was probably about 6 and just wanted to say that I liked their candy bars. The woman was very nice and took our address so they could mail us some coupons for free snickers bars.
It appears to be used or sampled in a couple of songs (by Anna Maria Jopek and Boozehounds), but these date in the 2000s so can't have come into the camel from then I suppose!
That's wild to get a real response like that. Bravo to Lego.
I offered to provide some expert help on a set they were designing once and they immediately put me in direct contact with the designer in Billund. No bureaucracy.
Why can't more companies be this good? I've been trying for years to get into one Google account of mine :(
The thing is, Lego is a "nice" company, and they care about their image. Answering obscure question the best they can goes a long way, people will be more than willing to share their anecdote. That's great publicity, and all you need are a few guys answering emails, most of them are likely to be copy-pasted for the most part, people are not that original. And if you get a truly original question, it may take a bit more time, but the impact will be greater, and I am sure employees have great fun finding these bits of trivia.
TV licensing on the other hand is "evil". They are in the business of collecting a tax that many people see as unfair, and prosecute those who don't pay. Even if their actions are fully justified, they won't make your life better, it is simply not their job. Even if they are genuinely nice in their communication, it won't change the fact that their are after your money and have to be forceful sometimes, and everything will be seen through these lens, so they might just as well assume their evilness.
The only thing I would say against this is that sometimes that kind of curiosity can help the business itself as well. For example imagine a situation similar to the post except that it's someone's job to manually write the equivalent of "Please do not write below the line" on every letter. Sometimes little tasks like that can waste time for years before someone finally asks 'do we actually need to be doing this?'
I do realise that is not the case in the post, where it's probably even simpler to print the same message on every letter vs. only on some. And your point is of course well made in general.
More importantly, they don't need to be nice and/or care to be successful.
Businesses are nice because they have to compete for customers, and that is easier if you're viewed as nice.
TV Licensing is a monopoly, they can have the worst customer service on earth, and that won't affect their revenue by much. There's just nowhere else to switch to.
This is also the reason why many government / publicly-run systems are so unfriendly and have such terrible UX. It's not like you can apply for benefits somewhere else (and the government would actually be very happy if you could!) , so nobody cares if the application is fifty pages and requires you to put in the same personal details 5 times.
To add insult to injury, there are no shareholders that demand the metrics to go up, so nobody has any incentive to optimize anything.
Something that goes to show how unnecessary much of it is is how I've found a staggering difference in paperwork between various US states. Registering a car in New York is equivalent to securing a mortgage with pages and pages of forms and a bill of sale and verification of insurance etc., while in New Hampshire you just show up with the title signed over to you and that's literally it, that's literally all you need to walk out with plates.
It fits the states' identities, New York is (somewhat exaggerating) a kafkaesque dystopia that wants to be in all of your business and have absolute control over everything you do, while New Hampshire's state motto is "Live Free or Die".
Capita would probably reply to a customer inquiry with this level of care and attention if appropriate.
Individual license holders are not customers, though. The customer is the BBC and its executives who administer the contract paying Capita huge amounts of money to extort people on their behalf.
They don't use non-descript vans. They want you to know who they are. Now, whether the vans can actually detect anything is a different matter. Some believe they are just a visual deterrent, and don't actually do anything beyond looking scary.
That is my understanding. They certainly had a demonstration device that could deduct a local oscillator, but it is suggested it was just PR.
There is some kind of 'detector' mentioned online that can apparently look at a window and see the light of a TV flickering on the glass! Judges buy this bs and issue warrants to search.
The point is they have as much to gain from encouraging people to believe they actively use "TV scanners" and you can't know when they are about with their vans as saying nothing.
Cynically it gets your auntie talking, brings TV license to front of mind.
It's doubtful they ever actually did such a thing.
I used to be a TV-free non-license-holding resident and found the constant accusations of criminality from "TV Licensing" (the BBC) infuriating. So I'm pre-disposed to be sympathetic to his crusade. Nice to see others enjoy it too.
Sometimes silly stuff stays around for years because there isn't anyone obstinate enough to question it. Good to have a little check on reality every now and then.
It's basically a whole parallel tax collection system, which is truly nuts. Like the administrative overhead alone surely outweighs any abstract concerns about independence from government, which doesn't really exist in the UK anyway.
We all pay to receive propaganda, be it governmental or not. A private TV channel will spread the ideology of their owners, and it is usually an ideology that is useful to them.
> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.
and
>...Cas Scott has said that the letters are not sought by TVL/BBC agents who make street visits.
Like, they show up at your home and ask to physically view your TV to make sure you aren't watching TV! It's so incredibly bonkers to me, I'm laughing out loud at work at the mental image!
This gets raised every charter renewal and they always find the administrative overhead of e.g. collecting Netflix subscriptions, etc. is pro rata higher than the overhead for the licence fee.
I interpreted the parent as suggesting "just pay for it out of general tax revenue", which makes a lot of sense to me. No additional administration and enforcement required.
The purpose is psychological to attach a monetary value to the government TV channels, which makes the viewer consider them valuable and therefore trustable.
Seems close enough. The article even discusses how it is "often considered a compensation for illegal file sharing". And even if it's common, that doesn't make it any less unfair. (Indeed, the longest section of the article is titled "Questions on fairness".)
I remember that in Poland electronic repair shops offered companies removal of the TV demodulator from TV sets used as monitors. That was necessary for the TV not to count as a TV receiver and thus not to generate the fee liability.
I think there also were some large cases where a company who owned a car fleet had to pay for the car radios.
that seems fine to me. whatever they want to call it, if it applies to everybody it's just a tax and they're using tax dollars to fund some TV content and/or infrastrcture. that's all totally normal.
the absurd part is restricting that tax to only people who watch TV, and trying to do surveillance and enforcement to determine whether or not somebody is eligible for a TV tax.
Well, first they wanted to tax everyone a bit to pay for the BBC. And then someone said that would let the government easily pressure the BBC by withholding funds. And then someone said let's let the BBC collect it's own tax then. And someone else said that would be illegal to make people pay for the BBC if they aren't actually receiving any services from the BBC. And so here we are. So they wrote in this provision that in practice exempts precisely zero people but everyone tries to chase after anyway, contorting themselves through hoops to make it apply.
"Any services from the BBC" means any. TV broadcast, radio broadcast, or internet streaming. And because the actual intention was to make everyone pay, the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one. If you have a computer and the Internet, you could receive internet streaming.
And then you have more stupid rules, like even though they're collecting a tax, they're not tax collectors so they don't have any authority to come into your house, so they invent weird ways to detect if you have a TV or not.
Presumably a left wing government would remove all this stuff and just make it a tax.
This isn't accurate, that's just what they want people to think. In practice it exempts most people below the age of about 30, most of whom do not consume any media within the scope of the TV license.
> the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one.
That's not true. You're allowed to own equipment capable of receiving licensed broadcasts, all that matters is that you don't.
The whole scheme seems like something an American would come up with: paying for public services with regressive user fees instead of broad-based progressive taxation.
But it's unheard of (for media[1]) in the US and common in Europe.
[1]The closest thing we have here might be parking passes for state parks, even unpopular ones where free parking would remain mostly empty.
This fee is hot topic in Germany. Our French friends also enjoy ARTE[1] but seem not to suffer anymore from this ridiculous fee.
Actually I’m surprised that the Swiss fee is even higher, despite everything in the Swiss is expensive.
[1] Big parts of our public television suck. But ARTE is awesome!
While the public television may suck, it still pays for the only real Independent news coverage in Germany. No matter what you think of the ARD or ZDF and their management boards, the work of the Deutschlandfunk and regional broadcasters is outstanding and a pillar of a free democracy.
I hate having to pay for distribution licenses for soccer games, but if that ensures continued support for high-quality journalism, so be it.
It sounds like you have lost your tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to acknowledge things aren’t merely black or white. I don’t blame you; it’s common these days.
DLF is the other high quality program aside from ARTE!
Regarding the content, it is for all and it is fine that 90% are not interesting for me. I struggle with the selection of news presented by ARD/ZDF, missing positiv news.
Soccer is interesting for many but I don’t get why the stream it live and remove it afterwards from the archives. If the organizer doesn’t want public reports with images I would exclude them. More time for broad reports about other sports (cycling, chess, esports…).
You say that, but I highly doubt you actually listen to the radio or podcast formats or view lots of the ZDF productions that are very much critical of the established parties, and regularly publish investigative research.
Journalists tend to have a high education background and thus tend to hold more progressive and liberal opinions, but that’s unavoidable. The public broadcast services are still miles ahead in terms of unbiased reporting than privately owned publications in Germany.
And having said all that; would you really want to have to choose between Fox News and ABC? Journalism should not depend on private interests. I’m not claiming it’s free of political influence either, but at least public broadcast includes provisions to prevent that. The alternative is worse.
When I was studying at the university, I shared a privately owned house with some other people. We did not have a TV license, but I wanted to buy a big screen TV to use as computer monitor in my room.
I found out that in my country you can have a third-party, approved technician come to your house to disable the tuner portion of your TV so that you would not have to pay any television license. Around this time analog broadcasting was already being phased out or had already completely shut down in my country. And although some kind of digital broadcasting over air-waves exists to replace it, most people do not use that. Instead, you'll typically buy a subscribtion via cable or via IPTV or via sattelite, all of which come with a separate box that plugs into your TV via HDMI instead of relying on the tuner in your TV, even if that tuner can decode digitally broadcast radio signals. So the tuner in the TV was not serving much of a purpose anyway, even if I'd ever want to use the TV as a TV.
I paid a technician a bit of money to come disable the tuner for me in my newly bought 55" LED TV. I was imagining that he'd be opening the TV and carefully removing some essential part. What he actually did was take a plier and break the input for the tuner and then put a small piece of tape over it. Simple solutions, I guess. Then, I think I also got them to write a letter for me confirming that the tuner had been disabled.
It cost me a little bit of money, but not too much. Less than paying the TV license fee for that and subsequent years I was staying in that house anyway.
These days, I still have the TV. I put it in my grandfather's house a few years ago so he could use it. He already pays TV license fee and has a digital receiver. It has HDMI out which goes in to the TV. So he is not inconvenienced by the broken tuner input of the TV either, just like I expected back then that this disabling of the tuner would never be a problem even if I ever wanted to use it as a TV.
It does seem kind of silly now, that I paid someone to come break the input for a portion of the TV that was never going to be needed even if you wanted to use it as a TV. But I still think it was worth it, and that it saved me from worrying about inspections. Even though no inspection ever happened at the house either back in the days where I was using it as a monitor for my computer.
As a UK resident and TV owner (who does not need a license), I wouldn't even mind that much if I was required to pay just for TV ownership. It's the "enforcement" system that's utterly broken (although I have no idea how it compares to other countries).
We have this ridiculous situation where I'm not required to pay (so I don't), yet the TV licensing people are allowed (required?) to send me junk mail week after week trying to trick me into thinking I do need to pay them.
Yeah, Austria had the british system for a while, but after everyone started streaming (because the content is better and prices are actually cheaper) they changed it so every household needs to pay.
Now I'm forced to pay for old sitcoms, astrology shows, soccer stuff and other useless things I don't watch anyways...
The absurdity in the UK is that it's a License fee and that there is this whole absurd enforcement system. In other countries it's a tax if you don't pay it, you are essentially not paying your taxes. I am OK with a universal tax for a universal service even if I don't use that service. What I am not okay with is fraudulent threatening letters, weirdos creeping in the bushes trying to see if I am watching TV and goons showing up at my front door to collect what they think I owe them.
Had a white van with huge antennas parked out front for a few days when they were refusing to believe that a large share house of young people didn't watch TV. This was in 2015. We didn't own a TV nor watch.
The van soon left after a few days but left a full bottle of yellow liquid. Makes a fun story, but yeah they threaten you a bunch and it's quite sad.
I lived on the Isle of Man for a few years back in the 90's. The white van would be spotted on the ferry coming over and a small notice in the paper would appear. Everyone hid their TVs for a couple of weeks, until the paper said the van was back on the ferry.
It sounds so farcical now, in our age of ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.
It's the same situation in German except they removed the TV requirement since the broadcasters put up token online content that you can watch/read on your phone an surely everyone has one of those. So no more visits from cunts trying to get you or your co-inhabitants to admit that you have a TV because ist now a 100% mandatory fee but it's still not officially a tax though and therefore collected by a non-government entity who have had to rebrand due to how unpopular they are.
In Germany, you cannot even legally listen to the radio without such a license (GEZ). It's also slightly more expensive than the UK TV License, coming in just under Netflix' premium plan (while offering mostly shite in return).
To clarify: currently, it doesn’t matter what you actually do (listen to radio, own a radio, own a TV…), everyone has to pay, unless they are exempt (due to low income, other social security, or being deaf and blind at the same time). So it doesn’t matter if you listen to radio or not. You (or the household you live in to be exact) has to pay.
Weirder still, the discounts stack! So blind people can benefit from buying a black-and-white TV for an additional discount.
I've given this a lot of thought in the past. The best I could come up with is that "legally blind" could still allow for someone with _very poor_ (colour) vision...
this is making me want to buy a black and white TV (or grab a monitor and set it to always show in black and white) just so I can buy the monochrome TV license for giggles
People who can’t see their colour TV pay more than people who can’t see their B&W TV.
Oh to be a a fly on the wall when the inspector has to explain the difference to a blind person.
I think it made a lot more sense in the past. The license is set up so it’s a consumption based tax rather than taxing everyone. So only people with TVs paid TV tax. If colour increased the costs, only people consuming colour paid those increases. I imagine it made much more sense before consumption was ubiquitous
When I lived in Britain in 1989-1992, at the time the rule was that battery-powered TVs were exempt from the license fees. I had a tiny TV that could be powered by 6 AA batteries. The screen size was approximately 3 inches / 7.5cm.
I don't know if the rules have changed since then, but if they are the same, then a battery-powered laptop would also be exempt (even in color.)
There has rarely (if ever) been a separate broadcast signal for B&W vs colour. Broadcasts began in B&W, over time upgraded to colour, but there wasn't a need to broadcast Channel <whatever> in B&W and broadcast the same channel in colour on a different frequency.
One single broadcast signal, and different capabilities of receivers.
I guess you _could_ have a modern digital receiver with SCART-out (if such a thing exists) to a B&W TV. This BBC article (2018) claims 7,000 people watching TV with a B&W licence – whether they were actually watching it in B&W is not known :-D
Although, yes, this sounds absurd, it's worth noting that the TV licence pays for the BBC and the BBC has extensive radio (and web) offerings not only television.
Of course, that still doesn't make sense because to the best of my knowledge you don't need a license of any kind to listen to the radio.
Anyway, perhaps blind people want to listen to the TV. There are a lot of programs that could make sense even if you can hear but not see them.
> you don't need a license of any kind to listen to the radio.
I believe you did once upon a time, but I guess they were phased out as TVs became more popular.
>The first supplementary licence fee for colour television was introduced in January 1968. Radio-only licences were abolished in February 1971 (along with the requirement for a separate licence for car radios).
I'm no fan of national broadcasters as a concept, but I have to say, the UK is excellent when it comes to audio description, much more so than any (English speaking) country I'm aware of. It's not just the BBC either, Sky and other private broadcasters also have relatively high standards.
For years, the only English AD you could get for extremely popular HBO shows, like Game of Thrones for example, were pirated British rips from Sky, as HBO famously refused to provide the service.
The TV license is certainly bit ridiculous, but being legally blind doesn't necessarily mean you can't see at all, just you fall below the legal threshold where it's judged that poor sight will interfere with your day-to-day life. Lots of people registered as blind can still watch the TV just fine even if they won't be able to see the detail.
The threshold is a lot higher than people think. I would be at the level of legal blindness without my glasses. I use my phone without glasses daily. A small laptop screen without glasses would be alright too, but desktop monitors are too big.
Of course, to be considered legally blind, your vision has to be that bad with the best correction available. (Below 20/200)
I mean, TV is an audiovisual medium. Audio/Visual. 50/50. Blind people can still listen to the TV (though arguably not have half the experience). The real question is if deaf people get the same discount.
In Japan the vast majority of people stopped paying their TV license after a string of NHK scandals and there's no penalty for failing to pay either.
It's just not enforced. Also the party platform wasn't to get rid of the license system but to encrypt the broadcast signal so that only willing NHK viewers would pay for the license.
Some people actually voted them into office as a joke and they turned out to be a bunch of racists with some really awful views and were overall absolute shite politicians. Who could have imagined?
Pedantry time! At least in Germany, the "Rundfunkbeitrag" is not a tax, but more like a fee. Taxes go into the overall budget of the collecting party who then uses a part of the budget to fund something. The broadcasting fee can only be used for the broadcasting system and does not go through the country's budget. This means to increase the broadcasting budget, the fee has to be increased and it can't be subsidized by increasing the budget without increasing the tax.
I learned about it when they knocked on my door (UK). Said I didn’t have a TV to which they replied they’d like to look around inside to confirm. LOL no.
Publicly funded media is a great thing to have, and the intention of TV License is to fund it independently from interference from the government of the day. In Australia there’s frequently stories about governments cutting ABC funding, which TV License is supposed to avoid entirely.
But the implementation in practice just sucks. It’s baffling to think of how much money is wasted on administering this additional tax program, sending out all these pretty aggressive letters, maintaining the website, and paying the real “inspectors” to knock on peoples doors.
News? Not going to be impartial so I'd rather be able to pick my poison - otherwise it's just propaganda.
Sports? A waste of money in my view and the state should not decide what kind of entertainment gets to exist.
Inane talks shows with hosts taking home ridiculous salaries which are funded by extorting money from people who are barely able to pay for their basic needs? Unjustifiable.
> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.
Just the thought of this is funny. What kind of uniforms do TV Officers wear? Do they get to carry a weapon? What happens if they find you watching a TV?
They wear a shirt and tie. No weapon. You don't have to answer the door to them. You don't have to let them in. However they are generally lieing scumbags who suggest that they are allowed in.
If they catch you watching TV they will report you for a £1000 fine and a criminal record. Failing to pay it will land you in prison.
I spent years without a license, you don't need one for YouTube and Netflix. I unplugged the aerial wire. You do need it for any live TV or BBC catch up TV. I got visited once during that time and he kept asking to come in, I kept telling him I didn't need to let him. He kept asking what I watch on TV, I told him politely, that was none of his concern.
If they suspect you are harboring an illegal TV then they will come back with a warrant and the police!
It's a horrible situation which I am convinced preys on the vulnerable.
We've been sent letters on an almost monthly basis claiming that an officer is "scheduled" to make a visit, that we have a "ten day window" to respond before they take action, etc... . Nothing ever happens and no one ever visits.
I know that you don't have to let the enforcement folk in, and if they turn up I'll politely ask to see their search warrant or for them to mind their own business. But lots of people don't know this and are conditioned to be passive. Prosecutions include the mentally vulnerable and people whose finances are handled by the council. There are thousands every year. Three quarters of the prosecutions are against women, and it makes up more than a quarter of prosecutions against women.
Yes, in fact there are tens of thousands of convictions every year. They disproportionately target vulnerable people like the disabled, migrants, and single mothers. The kinds of people who are likely to be at home when they come knocking during working hours, and who might have a lot of other things on their plate or might not be fully informed, I guess. There's some proper dystopian examples, for example a woman with Down's syndrome whose council pleaded guilty on her behalf, because it manages her finances. It's horrific.
We had those in Austria (they changed it so everybody is forced to pay for that now...). They basically have no rights themselves, but they pretended to do and even try to force you to allow them to enter so they can check that you have no TV receiver (including the built in ones in the TV) and say that they will come with the police and a search warrant if you deny them. It doesn't even matter if you have no antenna or no coax cable.
It's a tax but for some reason making it separate from the normal tax system makes it harder for the government to force political views on it... even though the government could easily pass a law saying "the board of directors of the BBC shall go to jail unless all reporting favours the Tories"
I think that's actually a reasonable point of view. The Brits I know have a feeling of ownership towards the BBC that they don't towards other public affordances.
...Apart from the NHS, that is. Which hardly prevented the Tories from sabotaging it for private profit.
Maybe the Conservatives (or their donors) didn't care quite as much about the Beeb? There's not a lot of money in it, and the gestures they did make towards it seemed to keep it from exposing too many of their other "projects", or maybe it was toothless all along. I dunno.
Still, it's an excellent broadcaster - still, in my opinion, the gold-standard in the English-speaking world - even if (perhaps) diminished from what it once was.
The BBC is prized in the UK, and rightly so. Most national broadcasters have strong public interest provisions but the Beeb has a history and culture of strong independent journalism, incredible childrens and family output and acts as a mainstay anchor to support a creative industry.
There is plenty to criticise but the weird ring fenced tax that we pay is incredible value for money (films, tv, web, journalism for the price of Netflix
How much taxpayer money is wasted on the accounting, the enforcement, and the scary-sounding letters? Wouldn’t it be better if the government just gave taxpayer money to the BBC directly?
You mean "how much money is given to people to do those things"? Because the money doesn't magically disappear in the pockets of "big beeb", all those tasks are performed by people who get paid for that, drawing an income and then spending the money they earned by economically participating in society.
There is no money being wasted. Although it might certainly be a case of paper being wasted.
The UK government/BBC is happy to give £91m/year to Crapita to administer the TV License [0], and there are a bunch of other contractors [1]. Almost 100 million pounds wasted that could be spent on programming, but instead go to private businesses. Instead, the UK government could just directly fund the BBC out of taxes. Even if it might require a small increase of the tax rate, they could save on the enforcement and tracking.
> Almost 100 million pounds wasted that could be spent on programming
That's kinda assuming that everybody would continue to pay the license fee if the enforcement was stopped.
I have no clue how much revenue the TV licenses generate, or whether 100 million for administration and enforcement is a reasonable number. It feels unlikely to me?
Google google google:
In 2021, there were 24.8 million households in England
The TV licence fee is currently £159 a year
So there'd be 4,000 million or so in revenue if every household paid for the license (more including the rest of the UK). I _guess_ maybe 2.5% isn't a unreasoable number for administration and enforcementment? It's better that, say, Apple taking 30%...
They're saying it would be cheaper to just have the government, which already has a whole apparatus for calculating, collecting, and enforcing tax, fund the BBC directly. So there would be no TV license.
My jurisdiction finally got rid of annual/biannual car registration fees and stickers. Was a rather pointless process other than collecting money.
Was hoping they'd raise gas taxes by 0.1cents/litre or something, but I guess they buried it in with other taxes.
Unfortunately, we still require driver's license renewals every 5 years for CAD$90. And they don't bother taking a picture with every renewal because that was too much bureaucracy for them. I think it's only once I'm 80 they'll haul me in for a cognitive test.
I appreciate state TV content and watch it regularly. But this argument just doesn't hold water. The service is so wonderful that they had to make it a criminal offence not to be a subscriber? And surely an "independent" TV station would have to be one which is not completely controlled by the state.
The bbc has been in a state of cost cutting as the Tory government of past 15 years has consistently throttled the licence fee as “punishment” for not being state controlled enough (ie Tory’s feel the BBC is biased against them
This is unlikely - partly any news media is biased against government as they do the actual decisions, but mostly the BBC is middle class britain incarnate, whereas the tories represent - well whatever the right wing is becoming these days.
As for licence fee - it’s basically a historical accident that became a ring fenced tax. Governments have strong views about people not paying taxes.
It's only an offense if you watch live TV [1]. They could have just lumped it in with your taxes, like they do in many other countries with state TV, but this approach in theory lets you opt out, even if they like to check up on you all too regularly. I suppose one downside of the BBC approach is tax is usually proportional to your income, while the TV license fee is not, and in fact you need to pay it even if you have no income. We had great games of hiding our TV in the closet as students whenever the license people came down the street.
They have zero power, it's just a man with a clipboard asking to have a look around your house, the correct response is to shut the door in their face.
They rely on a uniform and vague threatening language to trick people into thinking they have any authority.
Not a UK citizen, but from previous discussions on the topic:
> There are people going door-to-door to check TV licenses?
yes
> Are they cops?
no
> what kind of power do they have?
none. I mean write you a fine if you admit to illegally watching TV I guess. But as far as I've been told you can have the TV on and visible to the guy and go "nah that's an aquarium" and be fine.
The BBC has never offered any proof or explanation of how they worked, and there is some suspicion that they are fakes used for their psychological effect.
Pretty much the same as using Cable TV or Satellite TV without paying for a subscription. I don't see much difference between paying the BBC and paying Comcast.
In the case of Satellite TV, in the 1990s there were companies that sold decoder boxes so you could use a dish antenna without paying the Satellite TV company. You'd pay the pirating company instead. Lots of cat-and-mouse games involving changing encryption methods.
fwiw I think the BBC has become way too captured by culturally dysgenic rich kids (who else can afford to work for almost nothing in London) and is terrified of being seen as elitist (so won't really educate)
It would be easy to say they don't make anything like Kenneth Clarke programs anymore but even late Blair era documentaries seem to be fading away. Nature stuff is still good though but that's just cinematography.
I used to think this, but it's no longer true. BBC radio is pretty good value. CBBC is valuable in having an ad-free service for children. But the rest of terrestrial BBC is .. tired. It's not really changed since the advent of streaming services and youtube, which have eaten its audience from younger ages.
And BBC politics is awful. Question Time is full of planted audience members. BBC journos give softball interviews to their friends in the Conservative party.
Personally I'd split the BBC into National Archive (all the material before 2000) and BBC Ongoing, and make the latter into a normal private company which sells streaming subscriptions. And abolish the absurdity of the TV license and its often oppressive enforcement against the very poor.
In addition many articles focus on individuals which offer a skewed perspective. I stopped using the bbc news app after noticing I was only occasionally enjoying the long reads, and even then I don’t want woke politics snuck in
It's not just the UK, many countries have a government-run TV network, and they want that network to be subsidized only by the people actually watching TV, not random taxpayers who don't benefit from it.
If you were to design such a system in the 2020's, you could just put a DRM scheme on your broadcast and demand payment only from the people who actually want to watch that network specifically, but that technology wasn't yet available when such systems were designed.
Another claimed benefit of this way of doing things is the government's ability to produce programs that aren't commercially viable, e.g. targetting specific populations, minorities who speak a niche language, distributing important public information in a non-sensational way etc.
Most of these points are moot with the advent of the internet, though, hence why many countries want to or have abolished these licensing systems.
> they want that network to be subsidized only by the people actually watching TV, not random taxpayers who don't benefit from it.
Eh, the 2 countries I know charge people if they have a device capable of viewing the TV/radio/the TV/radio stations' online offer, so anyone with a smartphone (and who doesn't have a smartphone?) are also require to pay the license fee, even if they don't have a TV or radio at home.
There's a joke that since the license fee is charged if you have equipment theoretically capable of viewing TV, then maybe people should apply for government child allowance, since they have equipment theoretically able to make them parents.
It's real in the sense a thing called a TV Licence exists but the TV Licence enforcers are just an arm from the BBC who larp as a government organisation to threaten people.
If you go to the home page, you will see they have collected scans of these letters for every year since 2006.
Most likely they didn't expect anyone to go direct to this page
Yes, I submitted this sub-page as I thought the puzzle might interest (and amuse) the HN crowd. I'm sure the vast majority of people arrive at the site owner's main page though.
My guess is that they scan the letters that are returned by the post office and hence they don't want anybody writing below the line. I guess that they used to have a problem with squirrels opening up the letters and scribbling below the line. However, they seem to ignore the fact that squirrels can't read.
More likely is that whenever they print OCR'able numbers / barcode/ whatever, they assume that a person is going to return it -- and the special case of 'we only get returned letters when the delivery has failed and nobody has opened the envelope' escaped the testing.
Sometimes archaic things persist indefinitely in formal communication. Multiple organisations remind me I will need to install Adobe Acrobat in order to read linked PDF documents in their electronic communications.
> When the film opens, [Kempton Bunton] is refusing to pay his TV licence fee on a technicality, since he can only get ITV because he’s removed “the BBC coil” from inside the set. It’s all part of his “Free TV for the OAPs” campaign, but despite his well-meaning demeanour, he serves time at Her Majesty’s expense for refusing to pay up to Auntie Beeb.
I initially thought this was concerning emails, because for whatever reason, I've very recently noticed an uptick in "Please do not write below the line" a lot more in emails I receive, presumably to encourage top posting or perhaps for AI email ingestion? Anyway, apparently a strange coincidence.
This is done by a lot of customer support and helpdesk systems that one would almost consider “legacy” that are certainly not related to AI in any way.
So I would assume that the uptick is caused by you moving somewhat up in you career so you deal with such BS systems more often.
On the other hand, the approach with explicit markers in the email is reliable. Alternative is some bunch of ad-hoc rules that will extract the actual reply from the reply, which has a lot of edge cases (which for some systems even extend to edge cases that involve the MIME envelope, not the message text itself).
Ironically, I haven't noticed the Zendesk one and a lot of these appear to be from conversations with people in corporate, but perhaps they're running their email messages through some tracking system.
I don't own a television and don't want one (it's a waste of life). I get sent letters all the time. Last year I had an "inspector" turn up who was told to "fuck off", managed to gain entry to the apartment block and then came and knocked on my internal door and refused to show ID, clearly because he was an intimidating arsehole and didn't want to be called on it. He was told to "fuck off" again and told me he'd come back with the police if I didn't let him in. I told him I'd ram the bike handle up his arse if he came back.
Put a complaint in and they replied asking for my license number. Just like the stuff in that article - didn't even read it properly. Absolute clowns.
I used to live in a shared flat, and they sent individually addressed letters to each numbered room in the building - which, to my amusement, included the room number of the toilet.
The explanation is that this contracted out to Capita, which is the go to outsourcing company for UK government for tasks where a capacity for self reflection would be a disadvantage.
As this website showcases there's a huge variety of these letters and they are clearly thrown together cheaply by people trying to make things official looking and scary. I wonder whether the line is simply an easy way to make things official looking. Or perhaps even they once did have something to return but the designers have continued to copy and paste it forward with not connection to any actual process.
On the main page of the site, there's a scanned letter shown for every month, but it ends on April 2024. Does anyone know what happened to the author? If it weren't just tv licensing, I'd say it were worrying that there's been silence for the past several months after receiving such threatening letters.
The most baffling thing here is how the hell did the author get the organisation to respond, on topic, multiple times? In my experience conversing with various entities that are supposed to provide customer support, absolutely anything outside of an extremely narrow set of vetted topics with prepared answers and especially anything technical gets ignored and receives an irrelevant response at best.
It's from 2006, before organizations realized that there were lots of trolls willing to dedicate themselves to wasting other people's time over bullshit.
…which is somewhat ironic in the context of TV Licensing which trolls the British public en masse with its relentless and unnecessarily aggressive communications.
You guys could decide to fund the BBC in the sane, default way of taxing everyone instead of the asinine approach of trying to tie it to usage at any time.
Hilarious that every time, they responded in a way that was technically on-topic, but totally ignoring the actual questions being asked. Like someone found one word in OP's question, then mindlessly recited a random form response associated with that word.
this is, legitimately and without any exaggeration whatsoever, almost exactly how nearly everyone I speak to IRL as a homeless individual interacts with me. There are a few here and there that absolutely do make an attempt to have real discourse and actually discuss in context, but by an overwhelming majority, most of them just take the (to borrow from a response) SLM approach.
I assume they’re not really paying attention to you, like if you were a child vying for attention. You’re not likely to run into many salient points speaking to someone who isn’t tracking the basic things an adult should do.
To me, it didn't come across as deliberately evasive. It came across like tier 1 helpdesk not really understanding how a query fits into their pre-defined categories, and trying to be helpful anyway without really understanding the problem.
The later reply about it being because OCR does use what's below the line and it shouldn't be obscured looks like the ticket was escalated to someone who understood what was really being asked for.
Except that you might be missing the key fact: the letter is just a letter. It’s not a form that requests information from the recipient, and the recipient is not instructed to return it. Scanning it would be pointless, because all of the information on it was printed out by them!
Ooh! I wonder if most of the letters they send out are forms (expected to be returned), but all of their letters are on the same paper-stock, which is pre-printed with the (intended for forms) "don't write below" message.
Evidence in favor of this theory: the "don't write" message is in red text. It's cheaper to do two (or more) passes on one high-volume print run - and then single (B&W) impressions on the smaller runs for each individual letter or form - than it would be to do multiple passes for each and every order.
The support staff wouldn't be privy to these sorts of economic optimizations, so no wonder they couldn't give the guy a comprehensive answer.
I saw another example the other day of how things used to work. If you wrote to the UK government in the 1980s to ask (or complain) about their policy towards apartheid South Africa you received a personal reply addressing your points in the context of the government's policy [1]. Presumably, letters to other departments were handled similarly.
I've corresponded with the civil service a few times recently and the service now is shite.
Because it's government. People in government jobs often sit around half the day doing nothing because they have so much spare time. Case in point: me, right now.
I am assuming because the BBC is a government organization? I am not sure about the UK but where I come from the government is legally required to answer your request. They have to. Doesn't mean they'll answer your question but they'll answer something. (plus they have to confirm reception/delivery and stuff like that)
Where I said that the BBC were independent, I was responding to the parent thread which said the BBC are a Government organisation. The BBC are independent of the UK government.
The BBC are responsible for TV licencing, and they delegate (outsource) that activity to Capita. The day-to-day interactions, such as the emails from the website, are with Capita's support service, acting on instructions from the BBC.
The BBC aren't really independent of the government. They like to claim this and mostly get away with it, because British governments tend to be lenient with them and don't interfere. But they depend on taxes for the bulk of their income, their existence is defined by law and the government appoints the person who runs it. A change of government could completely change the BBC tomorrow and there'd be nothing anyone working there could do about it.
The existence of any media organisation (or any corporation) is defined by law; a change of government could in theory completely change any organisation in the UK.
But yes, "the Chairman and the non-executive members for the nations are appointed by HM The King on the recommendation of Ministers."
In reality, I suspect the ownership structure of a media organisation matters less than the ideologies of its directors.
Their contract is unlikely to allow queries to be ignored, and the people receiving the queries are likely to have targets to resolve "tickets" (queries) within a particular time / to a particular satisfaction.
If the query doesn't tick a particular easy-to-answer box, they'll use the best form answer available in order to "resolve" the ticket and meet their targets.
I'm actually totally stumped by the whole thing. OCR doesn't even make sense, because OCR is terrible at handwriting generally. With forms they usually require you to write block letters and numbers inside of a kind of separate grid for each field. And maybe fill in some bubbles too. Anything anywhere on the page outside of the form fields is ignored.
I'd find it far more plausible that they print all letters, those including forms and not, on the same template, and that returned forms get some kind of bar code or status stamped on the bottom upon being received, so they need to keep it empty for that. Kind of like how US envelopes get a little bar code printed on them by post office sorting. I have no earthly idea whether that's closer to the real reason though.
If you look up some of these letters you'll see they have the quasi-official-looking things you'd otherwise see on scam letters, like a stamp that says "Enforcement Visit Approved" with a signature on it.
I think "do not write below this line" is just another one of those things, it makes the letter seem like its part of Official Serious Bureaucracy.
That is true, but OCR is nonetheless used in many situations like this, for example at the postal office (the US postal office started doing this in 1965). Even if they can recognize only a fraction of the letters, it is a huge savings in terms of processing costs. The remaining will be handled manually anyway.
I think there's a pretty reasonable explanation here, which is that "Do not write below the line" is a genuine instruction, but not for the recipient of the letter.
Post offices may make notes such as "undeliverable" on a piece of mail. The sending company may make changes to their mailers which must be hand-updated on pre-printed cards. In both cases, writing below the line may obscure which ID had its letter rejected by the Post or which IDs have not had updated mailers sent yet.
By the time the recipient of the letter receives it, they may write below the line as much as they like, as the instructions have already been followed by those they were intended for.
I would not expect first line support to be aware of this.
336 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadThe OCR statement is confusing. It speaks of a customer manager trying to pass the buck down the line as quickly as possible
Though they knew this information when they sent it to the author, presumably it would be laborious to manually associate the same information with each returned letter (one would have to look it up anyway), so they probably print the data on the letter that may someday be returned, to allow quick lookup in the event it is returned.
It's equivalent to a conversation ID and interface crafted to avoid lookups, making this letter exchange idempotent, which I very much appreciate.
Why it was not requested to be returned is beyond me, but likely all such letters contain this.
But they didn't ask for the letter to be returned at all.
In which case… there would definitely be no need to instruct to not write anything below the line, as nobody would have opened the letter.
It's a form letter. In the event it's returned you want the data, regardless.
———————————————
Please have not written above this line.
Remember, temporal paradoxes are not covered by your insurer.
It seems the most likely explanation to me!
----
Edit: I will share what I think is a nice a little counterpoint story here, from a business that is clearly still interested in understanding. I sent Lego an email a while ago:
They replied a day later:https://github.com/dezonline/Vocal-Remover
I've always respected Johnnie Walker, but thought their offerings are overpriced for what they are (brand-name premium, I guess). However, I just discovered Johnnie Walker Double Black, and: wow. It's a nice, smoky whisky for $30-something a bottle. I don't know anything else I like better in that price-band. It's my new "table whisky". Great stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKpD-KkaBHc
We never worked it out.
I think SoundHound was the original I used, I think Google's will do the same.
https://secure.dewolfemusic.com/page/digiffects_sound_effect....
It appears to be used or sampled in a couple of songs (by Anna Maria Jopek and Boozehounds), but these date in the 2000s so can't have come into the camel from then I suppose!
I offered to provide some expert help on a set they were designing once and they immediately put me in direct contact with the designer in Billund. No bureaucracy.
Why can't more companies be this good? I've been trying for years to get into one Google account of mine :(
TV licensing on the other hand is "evil". They are in the business of collecting a tax that many people see as unfair, and prosecute those who don't pay. Even if their actions are fully justified, they won't make your life better, it is simply not their job. Even if they are genuinely nice in their communication, it won't change the fact that their are after your money and have to be forceful sometimes, and everything will be seen through these lens, so they might just as well assume their evilness.
I do realise that is not the case in the post, where it's probably even simpler to print the same message on every letter vs. only on some. And your point is of course well made in general.
Businesses are nice because they have to compete for customers, and that is easier if you're viewed as nice.
TV Licensing is a monopoly, they can have the worst customer service on earth, and that won't affect their revenue by much. There's just nowhere else to switch to.
This is also the reason why many government / publicly-run systems are so unfriendly and have such terrible UX. It's not like you can apply for benefits somewhere else (and the government would actually be very happy if you could!) , so nobody cares if the application is fifty pages and requires you to put in the same personal details 5 times.
To add insult to injury, there are no shareholders that demand the metrics to go up, so nobody has any incentive to optimize anything.
It fits the states' identities, New York is (somewhat exaggerating) a kafkaesque dystopia that wants to be in all of your business and have absolute control over everything you do, while New Hampshire's state motto is "Live Free or Die".
Individual license holders are not customers, though. The customer is the BBC and its executives who administer the contract paying Capita huge amounts of money to extort people on their behalf.
I agree, and I doubt the support munchkins would know anything about stationery purchase practices, which explains their befuddlement.
There is some kind of 'detector' mentioned online that can apparently look at a window and see the light of a TV flickering on the glass! Judges buy this bs and issue warrants to search.
Cynically it gets your auntie talking, brings TV license to front of mind.
It's doubtful they ever actually did such a thing.
Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.
Not that much of none state media is really that much better to be honest.
> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.
and
>...Cas Scott has said that the letters are not sought by TVL/BBC agents who make street visits.
Like, they show up at your home and ask to physically view your TV to make sure you aren't watching TV! It's so incredibly bonkers to me, I'm laughing out loud at work at the mental image!
Never change, UK, never change.
In my seven years of living in the UK, I’ve paid the TV licence for two years, and had one visit (who I shut the door on).
As of 2024 you pay even if you have no tv, which means the overhead is probably near zero, as you already have lists of where people live.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence
I think there also were some large cases where a company who owned a car fleet had to pay for the car radios.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/07/andrewosborn
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2542291.stm
the absurd part is restricting that tax to only people who watch TV, and trying to do surveillance and enforcement to determine whether or not somebody is eligible for a TV tax.
"Any services from the BBC" means any. TV broadcast, radio broadcast, or internet streaming. And because the actual intention was to make everyone pay, the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one. If you have a computer and the Internet, you could receive internet streaming.
And then you have more stupid rules, like even though they're collecting a tax, they're not tax collectors so they don't have any authority to come into your house, so they invent weird ways to detect if you have a TV or not.
Presumably a left wing government would remove all this stuff and just make it a tax.
> the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one.
That's not true. You're allowed to own equipment capable of receiving licensed broadcasts, all that matters is that you don't.
That's not true, according to https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence.
> You do not need a TV Licence to watch:
> • streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus
> • on-demand TV through services like All 4 and Amazon Prime Video
> • videos on websites like YouTube
> • videos or DVDs
But it's unheard of (for media[1]) in the US and common in Europe.
[1]The closest thing we have here might be parking passes for state parks, even unpopular ones where free parking would remain mostly empty.
[1] Big parts of our public television suck. But ARTE is awesome!
PS: ARTE is watchable outside of France and Germany in a lot of countries in Europe. Poland, Spain, Austria, Netherlands, Czech and so on.I hate having to pay for distribution licenses for soccer games, but if that ensures continued support for high-quality journalism, so be it.
You sound like you're in an abusive relationship. Get help while you still can.
Regarding the content, it is for all and it is fine that 90% are not interesting for me. I struggle with the selection of news presented by ARD/ZDF, missing positiv news.
Soccer is interesting for many but I don’t get why the stream it live and remove it afterwards from the archives. If the organizer doesn’t want public reports with images I would exclude them. More time for broad reports about other sports (cycling, chess, esports…).
Journalists tend to have a high education background and thus tend to hold more progressive and liberal opinions, but that’s unavoidable. The public broadcast services are still miles ahead in terms of unbiased reporting than privately owned publications in Germany.
And having said all that; would you really want to have to choose between Fox News and ABC? Journalism should not depend on private interests. I’m not claiming it’s free of political influence either, but at least public broadcast includes provisions to prevent that. The alternative is worse.
I found out that in my country you can have a third-party, approved technician come to your house to disable the tuner portion of your TV so that you would not have to pay any television license. Around this time analog broadcasting was already being phased out or had already completely shut down in my country. And although some kind of digital broadcasting over air-waves exists to replace it, most people do not use that. Instead, you'll typically buy a subscribtion via cable or via IPTV or via sattelite, all of which come with a separate box that plugs into your TV via HDMI instead of relying on the tuner in your TV, even if that tuner can decode digitally broadcast radio signals. So the tuner in the TV was not serving much of a purpose anyway, even if I'd ever want to use the TV as a TV.
I paid a technician a bit of money to come disable the tuner for me in my newly bought 55" LED TV. I was imagining that he'd be opening the TV and carefully removing some essential part. What he actually did was take a plier and break the input for the tuner and then put a small piece of tape over it. Simple solutions, I guess. Then, I think I also got them to write a letter for me confirming that the tuner had been disabled.
It cost me a little bit of money, but not too much. Less than paying the TV license fee for that and subsequent years I was staying in that house anyway.
These days, I still have the TV. I put it in my grandfather's house a few years ago so he could use it. He already pays TV license fee and has a digital receiver. It has HDMI out which goes in to the TV. So he is not inconvenienced by the broken tuner input of the TV either, just like I expected back then that this disabling of the tuner would never be a problem even if I ever wanted to use it as a TV.
It does seem kind of silly now, that I paid someone to come break the input for a portion of the TV that was never going to be needed even if you wanted to use it as a TV. But I still think it was worth it, and that it saved me from worrying about inspections. Even though no inspection ever happened at the house either back in the days where I was using it as a monitor for my computer.
We have this ridiculous situation where I'm not required to pay (so I don't), yet the TV licensing people are allowed (required?) to send me junk mail week after week trying to trick me into thinking I do need to pay them.
Now I'm forced to pay for old sitcoms, astrology shows, soccer stuff and other useless things I don't watch anyways...
The van soon left after a few days but left a full bottle of yellow liquid. Makes a fun story, but yeah they threaten you a bunch and it's quite sad.
It sounds so farcical now, in our age of ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.
Even if they could “detect” TV in your house they’d have no way of knowing if it’s a live broadcast or streaming/on demand.
It may have been an OB van or something else.
It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence#
> colour TV: £169.50 per year; monochrome TV: £57.00 per year; blind people: 50% discount
People who can't see their color TV at all pay more than people who can but have an old black-and-white one?
I've given this a lot of thought in the past. The best I could come up with is that "legally blind" could still allow for someone with _very poor_ (colour) vision...
Oh to be a a fly on the wall when the inspector has to explain the difference to a blind person.
I think it made a lot more sense in the past. The license is set up so it’s a consumption based tax rather than taxing everyone. So only people with TVs paid TV tax. If colour increased the costs, only people consuming colour paid those increases. I imagine it made much more sense before consumption was ubiquitous
I don't know if the rules have changed since then, but if they are the same, then a battery-powered laptop would also be exempt (even in color.)
If you're blind, you almost certainly qualify for a free license.
https://www.gov.uk/free-discount-tv-licence
https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/for-your...
One single broadcast signal, and different capabilities of receivers.
I guess you _could_ have a modern digital receiver with SCART-out (if such a thing exists) to a B&W TV. This BBC article (2018) claims 7,000 people watching TV with a B&W licence – whether they were actually watching it in B&W is not known :-D
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46125741
Of course, that still doesn't make sense because to the best of my knowledge you don't need a license of any kind to listen to the radio.
Anyway, perhaps blind people want to listen to the TV. There are a lot of programs that could make sense even if you can hear but not see them.
I believe you did once upon a time, but I guess they were phased out as TVs became more popular.
>The first supplementary licence fee for colour television was introduced in January 1968. Radio-only licences were abolished in February 1971 (along with the requirement for a separate licence for car radios).
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmcu...
I'm no fan of national broadcasters as a concept, but I have to say, the UK is excellent when it comes to audio description, much more so than any (English speaking) country I'm aware of. It's not just the BBC either, Sky and other private broadcasters also have relatively high standards.
For years, the only English AD you could get for extremely popular HBO shows, like Game of Thrones for example, were pirated British rips from Sky, as HBO famously refused to provide the service.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_description
Of course, to be considered legally blind, your vision has to be that bad with the best correction available. (Below 20/200)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZG95grO-vc
It's just not enforced. Also the party platform wasn't to get rid of the license system but to encrypt the broadcast signal so that only willing NHK viewers would pay for the license.
The tv license collection agency employs more than a 1000 people.
And this is in spite of the fact that nearly every household has to pay that €18.36 per month.
Publicly funded media is a great thing to have, and the intention of TV License is to fund it independently from interference from the government of the day. In Australia there’s frequently stories about governments cutting ABC funding, which TV License is supposed to avoid entirely.
But the implementation in practice just sucks. It’s baffling to think of how much money is wasted on administering this additional tax program, sending out all these pretty aggressive letters, maintaining the website, and paying the real “inspectors” to knock on peoples doors.
Depends on the kind of media.
Educational content? Sure.
News? Not going to be impartial so I'd rather be able to pick my poison - otherwise it's just propaganda.
Sports? A waste of money in my view and the state should not decide what kind of entertainment gets to exist.
Inane talks shows with hosts taking home ridiculous salaries which are funded by extorting money from people who are barely able to pay for their basic needs? Unjustifiable.
Why can't publicly funded media be impartial?
Should obviously be spelt loicence.
Just the thought of this is funny. What kind of uniforms do TV Officers wear? Do they get to carry a weapon? What happens if they find you watching a TV?
Amazing.
If they catch you watching TV they will report you for a £1000 fine and a criminal record. Failing to pay it will land you in prison.
I spent years without a license, you don't need one for YouTube and Netflix. I unplugged the aerial wire. You do need it for any live TV or BBC catch up TV. I got visited once during that time and he kept asking to come in, I kept telling him I didn't need to let him. He kept asking what I watch on TV, I told him politely, that was none of his concern.
If they suspect you are harboring an illegal TV then they will come back with a warrant and the police!
We've been sent letters on an almost monthly basis claiming that an officer is "scheduled" to make a visit, that we have a "ten day window" to respond before they take action, etc... . Nothing ever happens and no one ever visits.
I know that you don't have to let the enforcement folk in, and if they turn up I'll politely ask to see their search warrant or for them to mind their own business. But lots of people don't know this and are conditioned to be passive. Prosecutions include the mentally vulnerable and people whose finances are handled by the council. There are thousands every year. Three quarters of the prosecutions are against women, and it makes up more than a quarter of prosecutions against women.
The Guardian wrote an article about it earlier this year: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/29/tv-licence-fee...
Not strictly true, if you watch television channels live over YouTube you need one
https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/w...
...Apart from the NHS, that is. Which hardly prevented the Tories from sabotaging it for private profit.
Maybe the Conservatives (or their donors) didn't care quite as much about the Beeb? There's not a lot of money in it, and the gestures they did make towards it seemed to keep it from exposing too many of their other "projects", or maybe it was toothless all along. I dunno.
Still, it's an excellent broadcaster - still, in my opinion, the gold-standard in the English-speaking world - even if (perhaps) diminished from what it once was.
There is plenty to criticise but the weird ring fenced tax that we pay is incredible value for money (films, tv, web, journalism for the price of Netflix
Meanwhile the Canadian CBC is buried in taxes and has as many ads as any other station.
There is no money being wasted. Although it might certainly be a case of paper being wasted.
[0] https://www.capita.com/news/capita-announces-five-year-exten...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
That's kinda assuming that everybody would continue to pay the license fee if the enforcement was stopped.
I have no clue how much revenue the TV licenses generate, or whether 100 million for administration and enforcement is a reasonable number. It feels unlikely to me?
Google google google:
So there'd be 4,000 million or so in revenue if every household paid for the license (more including the rest of the UK). I _guess_ maybe 2.5% isn't a unreasoable number for administration and enforcementment? It's better that, say, Apple taking 30%...My jurisdiction finally got rid of annual/biannual car registration fees and stickers. Was a rather pointless process other than collecting money.
Was hoping they'd raise gas taxes by 0.1cents/litre or something, but I guess they buried it in with other taxes.
Unfortunately, we still require driver's license renewals every 5 years for CAD$90. And they don't bother taking a picture with every renewal because that was too much bureaucracy for them. I think it's only once I'm 80 they'll haul me in for a cognitive test.
So yes, of course there is absolutely money being wasted in this comparison.
This is unlikely - partly any news media is biased against government as they do the actual decisions, but mostly the BBC is middle class britain incarnate, whereas the tories represent - well whatever the right wing is becoming these days.
As for licence fee - it’s basically a historical accident that became a ring fenced tax. Governments have strong views about people not paying taxes.
[1] https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/t...
There are people going door-to-door to check TV licenses? Are they cops, what kind of power do they have? Seems extremely annoying and dystopian.
They rely on a uniform and vague threatening language to trick people into thinking they have any authority.
> There are people going door-to-door to check TV licenses?
yes
> Are they cops?
no
> what kind of power do they have?
none. I mean write you a fine if you admit to illegally watching TV I guess. But as far as I've been told you can have the TV on and visible to the guy and go "nah that's an aquarium" and be fine.
In the case of Satellite TV, in the 1990s there were companies that sold decoder boxes so you could use a dish antenna without paying the Satellite TV company. You'd pay the pirating company instead. Lots of cat-and-mouse games involving changing encryption methods.
It would be easy to say they don't make anything like Kenneth Clarke programs anymore but even late Blair era documentaries seem to be fading away. Nature stuff is still good though but that's just cinematography.
This will probably kill it.
And BBC politics is awful. Question Time is full of planted audience members. BBC journos give softball interviews to their friends in the Conservative party.
Personally I'd split the BBC into National Archive (all the material before 2000) and BBC Ongoing, and make the latter into a normal private company which sells streaming subscriptions. And abolish the absurdity of the TV license and its often oppressive enforcement against the very poor.
In addition many articles focus on individuals which offer a skewed perspective. I stopped using the bbc news app after noticing I was only occasionally enjoying the long reads, and even then I don’t want woke politics snuck in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5MnyRZLd8A
If you were to design such a system in the 2020's, you could just put a DRM scheme on your broadcast and demand payment only from the people who actually want to watch that network specifically, but that technology wasn't yet available when such systems were designed.
Another claimed benefit of this way of doing things is the government's ability to produce programs that aren't commercially viable, e.g. targetting specific populations, minorities who speak a niche language, distributing important public information in a non-sensational way etc.
Most of these points are moot with the advent of the internet, though, hence why many countries want to or have abolished these licensing systems.
Eh, the 2 countries I know charge people if they have a device capable of viewing the TV/radio/the TV/radio stations' online offer, so anyone with a smartphone (and who doesn't have a smartphone?) are also require to pay the license fee, even if they don't have a TV or radio at home.
There's a joke that since the license fee is charged if you have equipment theoretically capable of viewing TV, then maybe people should apply for government child allowance, since they have equipment theoretically able to make them parents.
It's real in the sense a thing called a TV Licence exists but the TV Licence enforcers are just an arm from the BBC who larp as a government organisation to threaten people.
So in a sense it's real but it's also not.
More likely is that whenever they print OCR'able numbers / barcode/ whatever, they assume that a person is going to return it -- and the special case of 'we only get returned letters when the delivery has failed and nobody has opened the envelope' escaped the testing.
> When the film opens, [Kempton Bunton] is refusing to pay his TV licence fee on a technicality, since he can only get ITV because he’s removed “the BBC coil” from inside the set. It’s all part of his “Free TV for the OAPs” campaign, but despite his well-meaning demeanour, he serves time at Her Majesty’s expense for refusing to pay up to Auntie Beeb.
So I would assume that the uptick is caused by you moving somewhat up in you career so you deal with such BS systems more often.
On the other hand, the approach with explicit markers in the email is reliable. Alternative is some bunch of ad-hoc rules that will extract the actual reply from the reply, which has a lot of edge cases (which for some systems even extend to edge cases that involve the MIME envelope, not the message text itself).
I don't own a television and don't want one (it's a waste of life). I get sent letters all the time. Last year I had an "inspector" turn up who was told to "fuck off", managed to gain entry to the apartment block and then came and knocked on my internal door and refused to show ID, clearly because he was an intimidating arsehole and didn't want to be called on it. He was told to "fuck off" again and told me he'd come back with the police if I didn't let him in. I told him I'd ram the bike handle up his arse if he came back.
Put a complaint in and they replied asking for my license number. Just like the stuff in that article - didn't even read it properly. Absolute clowns.
(Regarding how he got them to reply at all, this is required by law of public authorities.)
life is exhausting sometimes
The later reply about it being because OCR does use what's below the line and it shouldn't be obscured looks like the ticket was escalated to someone who understood what was really being asked for.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/806/
Evidence in favor of this theory: the "don't write" message is in red text. It's cheaper to do two (or more) passes on one high-volume print run - and then single (B&W) impressions on the smaller runs for each individual letter or form - than it would be to do multiple passes for each and every order.
The support staff wouldn't be privy to these sorts of economic optimizations, so no wonder they couldn't give the guy a comprehensive answer.
I've corresponded with the civil service a few times recently and the service now is shite.
[1]: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/10/who-are-the-...
The TV licence scheme is _administered_ by Capita on behalf of the BBC. Those responses are coming from Capita.
http://www.bbctvlicence.com/TVL-BBC%20hiding%20of%20identiti...
The BBC are responsible for TV licencing, and they delegate (outsource) that activity to Capita. The day-to-day interactions, such as the emails from the website, are with Capita's support service, acting on instructions from the BBC.
But yes, "the Chairman and the non-executive members for the nations are appointed by HM The King on the recommendation of Ministers."
In reality, I suspect the ownership structure of a media organisation matters less than the ideologies of its directors.
Their contract is unlikely to allow queries to be ignored, and the people receiving the queries are likely to have targets to resolve "tickets" (queries) within a particular time / to a particular satisfaction.
If the query doesn't tick a particular easy-to-answer box, they'll use the best form answer available in order to "resolve" the ticket and meet their targets.
I'm actually totally stumped by the whole thing. OCR doesn't even make sense, because OCR is terrible at handwriting generally. With forms they usually require you to write block letters and numbers inside of a kind of separate grid for each field. And maybe fill in some bubbles too. Anything anywhere on the page outside of the form fields is ignored.
I'd find it far more plausible that they print all letters, those including forms and not, on the same template, and that returned forms get some kind of bar code or status stamped on the bottom upon being received, so they need to keep it empty for that. Kind of like how US envelopes get a little bar code printed on them by post office sorting. I have no earthly idea whether that's closer to the real reason though.
I think "do not write below this line" is just another one of those things, it makes the letter seem like its part of Official Serious Bureaucracy.
That is true, but OCR is nonetheless used in many situations like this, for example at the postal office (the US postal office started doing this in 1965). Even if they can recognize only a fraction of the letters, it is a huge savings in terms of processing costs. The remaining will be handled manually anyway.
Post offices may make notes such as "undeliverable" on a piece of mail. The sending company may make changes to their mailers which must be hand-updated on pre-printed cards. In both cases, writing below the line may obscure which ID had its letter rejected by the Post or which IDs have not had updated mailers sent yet.
By the time the recipient of the letter receives it, they may write below the line as much as they like, as the instructions have already been followed by those they were intended for.
I would not expect first line support to be aware of this.