In the UK you always needed a TV license to watch live TV, even fully commercial stuff like Sky. Now that consumption is more on the streaming than the broadcast model, there needs to be a rebalancing to properly fund the subsidised channels.
Personally I think it’d be a lot better coming out of general taxation. The BBC is a public service like schools. You pay for schools whether you have kids in them or not, and it should be the same. That keeps it available for everyone, and in everyone’s interests to keep high quality. Requiring an extra payment for services which don’t get money out of it doesn’t make much sense.
Yeah I don’t get tax being particular to the thing excepting negative things. So I kinda get a gas tax especially if you want to reuce ice vehicles and such and like taxes on drugs and alcohol and gambling and such. Still not sure if those should be the base for roads and addiction counseling or such but I guess that gives a good idea of what the amount should be but it gets hinky of its actually effective at reducing the things.
I think the BBC should be scrapped they won’t say a bad word against Trump or Israel it’s blatantly biased and doesn’t meet its charter. On top of that it hasn’t made a single thing I want to watch since the Top Gear days.
Also the license fee is meant to be for over the air live TV, what’s next paying a license fee to Sainsburys everytime you buy something at Tesco.
If the BBC is so good and so worth keeping about etc it should be a subscription service behind a paywall and not leeching from other companies.
The truth is it’s dying because it deserves to and nobody will ever want to pay for a company that does nothing for them and trys to extort them with nonsical legal threats that they post out every month. This won’t save it either it’ll just cost Netflix and Amazon as the BBC tries to drag them down with it.
I listen to the BBC most days. They routinely report absolutely damning things about Trump and about Israel.
Also the license fee is meant to be for live TV
Question-begging.
If the BBC is so good and so worth keeping about etc it should be a subscription service
Ah, so it can turn to lowest-common-denominator shit and get bought in 5 years by the animated corpse of Rupert Murdoch. Wonderful.
Public service broadcasting (as a concept, not PBS) is a public good, and needs to be paid for as such. If it only gets money from the people who watch it, it doesn’t fulfill the goal of being something available to everyone; it will cater more and more to its narrow audience. It’ll get more biased as it caters to that audience’s biases.
You watching a different BBC than me because I see their news reports talking about Lebanon and Gaza being bombed but they Never actually say which Country is bombing them or give any real details.
Here’s one link but I could find dozens all talking about the same thing.
My opinion BBC is just propaganda that makes trash programming and if they can’t fund themselves tough.
Two things. First, I’m listening to a BBC where Jeremy Bowen comes out and describes the utter devastation that Israel has wrought on Palestine, where they get aid workers, UN diplomats, campaigners, legal experts and all sorts to come on and do interview after interview in which they lay out exactly what Israel has done, why they are war crimes, and what the evidence is.
Second, I don’t need a news organisation to tell me that Netanyahu is an evil murder to draw that conclusion myself from the factual reporting they already do. Seems like nor do you.
I don’t think their reporting is perfect, but one thing I do know is that the times I remember people complaining about their reporting in the past, those people put forward something far more biased as a better option. The BBC is at least trying to be impartial. Yeah, their language could be a bit tougher but at the end of the day it’s not the presence or absence of tough language which makes the difference here: it’s whether you report the facts as best as it’s possible to discern them.
Getting closer and closer to the old cable costs everyone cut the cord for.
I hear what you’re saying and I agree, but this specifically is just a BBC/british thing.
Overall all the streaming companies are raising prices for profit regularly and introducing ad tiers everywhere to enshittify it to the max. Can’t wait for them to start delivering targeted advertisements in the UI “but not in shows!” in all tiers, because that’ll come before they put ads in all tiers and introduce a new supertier that costs much more and has less ads. It’s all just $.
It amazes me the Brits don’t just add “TV license” to the tax pile rather than keeping it an individual fee. It’s such a nonsense game to pretend there are people in the UK who never watch TV/BBC.
They’ve been pretty conservative in terms of Europe. It’s the same mindset for people in the US who don’t want to pay for public transit because they “don’t live in the city” but sure love the subsidies those city workers provide in taxes to the state.
Netflix and Amazon are already not worth their prices stick the BBC fee on top of that and there’s going to be a lot of cancellations.
Be nice if they took the BBC and UK gov to court and won.
