Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpark | Hacker News Reader

The BBC license fee is weird. Functionally everyone has a TV of some sort. If you want to tax everyone to pay for BBC content, why not just charge every taxpayer consistently (minus whatever discounts legislators think are appropriate). This “extending to streaming services” thing is bizarre. Netflix licenses BBC content if they stream it (right?) so this is asking for double payment.

View on HN

The licence fee is currently only due if you watch live content. Owning a TV is not sufficient as there are now many people who own a TV set but don't actually use it to watch TV broadcasts, and there's not really much distinction between a TV and a computer screen other than size (kudos if anyone reading has a 70" computer screen though) and having a TV tuner built in these days.

That's the root issue really. The BBC is a provider of media that's increasingly irrelevant, and even if approval of it hadn't declined precipitously over the last decade or so it'd still have a big issue with the youth mostly not being interested in that format at all. It's not the only reason for declining ratings (declining quality is a big one) but it's a bad sign for the future.

To be fair, they dug their own grave. Schmoozing to the party in power for the last decade practically destroyed all of their credibility in the eyes of the youth. Not to mention, the BBC was the champion of empty virtue signalling in its programming, which gave enough fodder to neo-right online media outlets to render it irrelevant in the eyes of the right-wing population. Perhaps the only ones who'll clutch their BBC pearls are the Telegraph readers still dreaming of the good old days of yore.

Yeah, I don't honestly know anyone who's even remotely happy with the BBC these days. There are different hopping off points, but no-one really respects them all that much any more and they don't exactly do a lot to keep people tuning in with the absolute rubbish they fill their schedule with.

> The licence fee is currently only due if you watch live content

That is what I thought, but the article characterizes it more broadly: "Currently, anyone who uses a television to watch content must pay the licence fee even if they do not watch the BBC"

I think they must have meant to say live television content, otherwise the fee would already apply to streaming services or anything you can watch through the tv.

It does but only to live content not catch-up/on-demand. Technically if you watch, for example, a live football match on Amazon Prime you are due to pay the licence fee. This is of course completely unenforceable even by the already low standards of the licence fee and as live content is a very small % of what the streaming services offer they can't blanket charge it.

Twitch streams don't count afaik as they aren't TV-like content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com