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I'd have more sympathy if I didn't get numerous letters saying YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW ~if you watch live TV without a licence~ YOU WILL GO TO JAIL ~if our enforcement officers find you have been watching live TV without a licence~
Contact us to apply for an exemption if you don't watch live TV (as if a paid licence is a given that you must request an exemption from)
No sympathy for these tactics
TV detection vans are real but they aren't high tech. Some people think they have fancy antennas that can detect your TV. Other people think it's all a bluff and the antennas on the roof of the van are fake just for show.
The truth is much simpler. The antennas on the top of the van are real, but they just receive regular TV broadcasts. The technician watches TV in the back of the van. They also point a parabolic microphone at your window so they can hear what's happening inside the house.
If there's a TV playing in the house, the technician flips through TV channels to see if they can synch up the mic audio with the broadcast audio. If they record a perfect match, that's sufficient to prove that you're watching broadcast TV, not just a recording, VHS, DVD, or streaming service.
And that's a legal tactic? That's basically spying on people and what they do in their houses.
Welcome to Britain, where the laws are made up and your rights don't matter
the number of adults still using its TV, radio and digital services remained at 94 per cent of the population
It really seems like something that should be handled with a tax.
I don't believe this. Based on my zero evidence view.
I'd be interested to see where that number comes from because im fully sceptical of their ability to determine that.
It's not that hard to find viewing/listening numbers and site visitors.
You can frame it in a lot of ways, to balloon the number. Daily, weekly and monthly users would be interesting numbers to have.
The above numbers might indicate 94% interacts with BBC at least once a year, we can't know. As the quote isn't specifying how they determined it
I mean you're not going to pay for telly if you can't afford food or AC.
I and many others cancelled tv licenses due to the BBCs complicity in genocide
AC is not a thing here. Our houses were built when the climate was correct, and we needed to keep heat in.
That's why we complain about heatwaves that bring us the same temperatures as the US experiences, we don't have respite.
I know AC is not a thing hence the need to pay to put it in. I know central Air is out due to no ducts but my uncle had AC installed in his conservatory last year and it was not cheap.
I'm pretty sure that a lot more Brits presently have a television than air conditioning.
searches
In 2025, there were 29.0 million households in the UK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom
In March 2024, there were 23.9 million licences, of which 3,600 (0.015%) were monochrome (black and white).
So about 82% of households have a TV.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/28/air-conditioning-uk-homes-heatwave
An estimated 4m homes have an air conditioner, double the figure from three years ago.
And about 14% have air conditioning.
EDIT: Also, the TV number might be higher, given that I imagine that there's some portion of the population that owns a television and just isn't paying the licensing fee. This would just be a floor on the number.
I don’t know anyone with AC. I don’t know anyone without a TV.
Do consider, a TV starts at around a few hundred quid. AC, for a single unit installed, is £3.5k.
I still think the BBC is worth preserving but I've no idea how it should be done
Direct gov funding seems out of the question as independence is required for reputational reasons at least
Extending license regs so you need one to watch youtube/netflix/etc an obvious non-starter (hopefully)
Expanding commercial operations so they can sell access to archives through iplayer, overseas subscriptions, Huw Edwards merch etc might be ok but unlikely to raise the billions required to operate
At this point is it saveable?
Direct government funding works. We have it for the BBC's cousin, the ABC, in Australia.
It's somewhat contractual that the ABC's content is independent, impartial and bipartisan.
The only problem with government funding is when the government cuts the funding for actually exercising independence, impartiality and bipartisanship.
They should start selling iPlayer licences to foreign people. I'd love to pay to watch BBC but they won't take my money. So now I give the money to a VPN company instead.
The problem here is that they are used to the model where they sell a license to say Sherlock for US audiences and it's Netflix that buys that for a huge pile of cash. Could they probably make a lot more by cutting out the middle man? Sure, but then they'd have to support all those users directly.
Most of the content is sold abroad via BBC worldwide, which has different rules from the rest of BBC when it comes to profit.
The government under Cameron blocked the BBC turning iplayer into netflix back when that was still possible as the Conservatives hate the BBC even after they neutered it with many changes including making the license fee optional if you own a tv but don't watch BBC or live tv.
IMO trying to milk the end users here is the wrong move. People are unsubscribing from the licence because they're not using it and don't want to pay £170 a year for something they don't use. Which is fair.
But one could easily "tax" the other services - TV channels, radio, streaming platforms like Netflix or Spotify, pushing these companies to provide 1% of their revenue to fund the public broadcasts.
Combine that with the licensing the content abroad and you've got a plan going.
Netflix tax
I quite like this idea
I wouldn't say "gov funding", as the money comes from tax payers. It has to be publicly funded. As long as the entity is managed democratically, I think it's worth preserving.
I meant to give a few of the alternative funding arrangements if the license fee were scrapped but I managed not to say that part out loud, oops
They have a streaming service. They can charge for it.
Doesn’t seem that complicated.
Frankly, it makes more sense than charging people for broadcast TV.
They already sell it to the yanks as Britbox and are reasonably successful at it but the license fee currently covers about four billion quid of their six billion annual operating costs. They don't have to do Netflix numbers but it's a lot of subs to sell (assuming that it must remain free to UK viewers and of ads)
The license fee is what the UK user currently pays, if you remove the license fee it won't remain available to the UK audience for free
As a yank who has perused…and may also have been known to use a VPN to change countries to watch various things…I’ve compared the two and BritBox isn’t really the same. A fair amount of things are available sometimes, but it’s just not fully comparable.
They should sell the full service to the rest of the world like it’s presented to the locals. I’m sure there’s some Brit expats who might love to have it properly available to them.
You're right. They hide their shame from curious limeys by geoblocking britbox.com, but a vpn trip to Texas reveals it looks like a load of old shit on offer (Twenty Twenty Six is probably good though)
So as for they should sell the full service to the rest of the world, I agree. i suppose it's licensing issues or they'd be doing it already? Much of their programming is not made not in-house but by external production cos
The problem is that TV is a slowly dying format, so any attempt at saving the BBC is an uphill struggle even with the best will for it. Which I think is a shame, I think it's culturally important. It needed to have evolved quicker and sooner, but how exactly I don't know.
Broadcast TV may be a dying format. But, BBC is a lot more than broadcast TV. They do radio, they do podcasts, they do short form video content, they do streaming, they do VOD, they do web news and blogs.
IMO, that's the problem with a TV subscription. A lot of people interact with BBC stuff on a daily basis on phones, computers, game consoles, etc. It's hard to avoid seeing a piece of BBC content even if you don't own a TV.
I am in Switzerland and I watch tons of BBC content online, listen to BBC World Service evwry other day and enjoy quite a few BBC podcasts from time to time. BBC produces some of the best content!
I wonder if it would be possible to do direct government funding but via legislation that states that it needs a supermajority or something to be repealed
Direct gov funding seems out of the question as independence is required for reputational reasons at least
It is dependent on direct govt funding now. The independence comes from being run by a trust.
The only politically viable solution is to abolish the licence and allow advertising on some services.
