Oolite Bulletins

Is your tv license worth the fee.
Does the BBC advert themselves as much as pay tv on your payed add free entertainment?

No TV here - threw the damn thing out back in the nineties. It's always entertaining when the enforcers come calling.

I kinda support keeping the licence fee though, in the hope it'll prevent/delay the introduction of an internet tax.

Here in Denmark its a 200kr/month per household fee. It has changed from being TV+Radio requirement only to "Everything that can connect to Air-Radio/TV and Digital Radio/TV/internet", so basically if you have an ancient nokia telephone which supports FM radio if the headphone is plugged in, then you have to pay the fee.

Personally I think it sucks bigtime to have that fee, as I havent used public air-tv or their internet tv for ages, and you can basically get subscriptions for HBO+NetFlix+Spotify for 200kr/month.
We do get a lot of public radio channels and 6 tv channels for the money, but honestly it doesnt feel like free public tv. It feels like a crappy subscription you cannot get rid of....

Basically I watch Doctor Who, Sherlock, and the news occasionally, very little TV apart from that unless I'm feeling unusually bored. I doubt I watch 50 hours a year. I don't really feel it's worth the license fee any more, but I'm not opposed to the point of cutting off all broadcast TV to avoid paying it - I do occasionally feel like watching something other than a DVD.

I don't watch a huge amount of TV either, now … then again, neither do I go to school, or have any kids of own to send there. There are things which are worth paying for collectively, and at around 40p per day it's not like it's costing me anything I can't afford. It's arguable that having a broadcaster which is not solely focused on gaining the biggest audience for everything it does, for the sake of running adverts past their glazed eyeballs every 10 or 15 minutes, is not only a good thing in itself but helps to maintain a level of quality which might otherwise be lacking. Also, when I do watch TV (there was a very good programme on Japanese art on BBC4 last night, for example) not being shouted at every fifteen minutes by shills flogging crap I neither need nor want - followed by a three-minute voice-over recap of what happened before the adverts intruded - is a definite plus.

Whether this is a model which can continue much longer in the face of subscription channels is another question. I don't subscribe to any TV channels, myself, and don't feel that I'm really missing anything, but everything in the sector is changing incredibly fast and a model designed in the early 1900s may not be able to adapt.

Also, it's worth noting that the billionaire owners of numerous other media outlets are all violently keen that the BBC should be done away with, which seems to me like an excellent reason to keep it. 40p per day to give Rupert Murdoch hypertension sounds like a bargain.

Disembodied wrote:

Also, it's worth noting that the billionaire owners of numerous other media outlets are all violently keen that the BBC should be done away with, which seems to me like an excellent reason to keep it. 40p per day to give Rupert Murdoch hypertension sounds like a bargain.

<nods>