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Comment by sys_64738 | Hacker News Reader

Doing away with the TV license will destroy The BBC and make British television no different from any other country which depends on advertising. In 10 years they will fondly recall the good times before the BBC was destroyed by the Tory party.

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It's not zero sum.

"Some 74 per cent of the 114,000 convictions for licence fee dodging in 2019 were for women" https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/decriminalis...

TV licence prosecutions are more than 1 in 10 UK court cases https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10256679/...

So hundreds of thousands of people a year are being criminally prosecuted and convicted in service of this funding model, at the tax payer's expense.

We wouldn't stand for this for any other media organisation because it's fundamentally wrong. No amount of PR puff about the BBC changes that.

I am not British, but the TV license thing confuses me. Apparently you need a license if you own a device and use it to watch live streaming on Youtube (its not always obvious what is being live streamed or just a video) and I guess anything on Twitch.

https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/t...

My country has a couple of public broadcasters and we don't have to pay a fee, but they do show ads.

It is a tax, but they did not want to call it a tax, so they called it a “license fee” that they figured few would opt out of since almost everyone used to like watching broadcasted TV.

Now that the assumption is false and many do opt out of the TV license by not having a TV, they are grasping at straws to still be able to collect the tax from as many people as they used to be able to collect from.

The government can just commit to a certain level of funding for them. Plenty of countries have state owned broadcasters that revive government funding.

Why stop there? What about state funded newspapers? And there goes government criticism

NPR, CBC and the BBC receive government funding and that doesn't seem to squelch criticism.

That doesn't mean that they're free from bias, but the alternative is for-profit organizations where content can be compromised by the need for revenue, and partisanship seems to be more of an issue.

Set up the organisation so it is run by a truly independent board. And be eternally vigilant so any one group can't get control.

Just fund it as part of taxpayer’s money, like most countries do with public broadcasting.

Public broadcasting exists in the US without this kind of fee. PBS+NPR get some funding indirectly from the CPB which gets tax dollars but they are primarily funded by donors.

The BBC is a world of difference from PBS. Think of the BBC like ABC or CBS but with no advertising.

Australia did away with its TV license in 1974, and continues to operate the ABC as a government funded broadcast network comprising 5 TV channels and several radio stations.

It’s fine.

The ABC’s level of content is not in the same league as the BBC, broadcast or online. (Aus resident)

BBC is world renowned, mention the BBC and most people know it due to its reach. I’m not so sure the same can be said for the ABC.

The BBC may be able to adapt if they loosing the license fee but it’ll be a shell of its former self.

The BBC had some technical innovations in Broadcast due to its funding model. Working there nearly ten years ago the underlying tech may of changed today but they where doing back then what is popular today. There online architecture could be described as micro services back then, micro-front ends, home-built PaaS which I think was way ahead of its time and the two unicorns I worked at since and countless tier one companies can only envy. I credit a lot of what I know due to my experiences at the BBC.

Even accounting for the differing population sizes, ABC's output seems much smaller than BBC's.

As an Aus resident, I barely consume any ABC media (occasionally the ABC site, for local news I haven't found elsewhere).

The BBC has a commercial arm, they sell content overseas so are more like a combination of a national broadcaster and a very large commercial studio. The population of the UK is also 2.5x the size of AU.

I am sure ABC also sells shows overseas, but a lot of Australian content, eg Harrow, is produced by American production companies and filmed in Australia.

Many European countries have a TV license equivalent. What makes you think the UK isnt already like many other countries in terms of national broadcaster?

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