You're not legally required to pay for either of those simply because you own a television.
I have a lot of love for the BBC and its history, but the license fee is very difficult to justify.
I have a lot of love for the BBC and its history, but the license fee is very difficult to justify.
Now of course, you can disagree about the value proposition, and you can disagree about the choice on how to fund it. But that's the justification, and it's not hard.
The license fee was established because of fundamental beliefs about issues like free riding, externalities and more. You might prefer a subscription based model - I'm sort of on the fence myself, but it's not obviously wrong - but the BBC license fee was set up out of an explicit disbelief that such systems would work. Granted, some of the issues were technological - you couldn't actually stop people watching OTA broadcasts at the time. But even though those have changed, the beliefs about the funding structure have not.
Nowhere near as bad as other channels in that sense, but still there.
Historically, there have been also been substantial numbers of people who watched the BBC without licences in the Republic of Ireland and the Netherlands, but they couldn't do a thing about it. The BBC tended to be watched in the east of the Republic of Ireland and near the border with Northern Ireland. (Not so much in France from what I can tell.) Many of the houses in Dublin used to have massive tall TV aerials to receive it. Most have been removed now. (Within the Republic of Ireland, RTÉ is funded by their own licence system, but also has proper advertising on it, unlike the BBC. It has had similar questions about it.)
No, I can't.
The other advertising includes heavy promotion of BBC linked charities such as Comic Relief, Children in Need and so on. These charities make big money and there have been some questions about how that money is used and where.
BBC advertising is less obnoxious than commercial channels, but it is still there. In addition, the BBC owns BBC America (which carries commercial breaks), as well as having shares in services accessible in the UK including the "BritBox" streaming service, and the digital channels "Dave" and "UK Gold" which all have normal commercial breaks.
2) I have a very hard time considering a media organization mentioning its own products and activities in its content as "advertising". If you want to use the word that way, be my guest, but my understanding (and I think most people's understanding) of the term implies a 3rd party paying a media organization to include marketing content in their output.
3) Fair point about BBC America, but I don't think it really invalidates the point.
The BBC has a perpetual Catch 22 around self-advertising, much like the NHS.
> watch or record programmes as they're being shown live on any TV channel
> The rules apply to any device on which a programme is viewed, including a TV, desktop or laptop computer, mobile phone, tablet, games console or set-top box.