Licensing for UK Television

[marty59]

Here's something else about to happen in the UK if you plan on buying that large screen plazma..
http://www.independent.co.uk/environ...n-1299665.html

I don't wish to rant and risk this being pulled, but it's important to share.

[Kiwick]

We've always had a TV licensing fee here in Italy, it was strictly enforced until the mid 80s, everytime you bought a new TV the dealer had to notify your purchase to the government.

If you didn't want to pay that fee anymore, you had to sell or discard the TV set, then they came to your home to make sure you no longer had a TV, if you wanted to keep your TV set without paying the fee, they would open it, disconnect the CRT and place a seal on the socket to prevent you from watching it anymore.

I've found many scrapped TVs with seals on their CRTs, those lead and wire seals are a PITA to remove if you don't want to damage the CRT.

the fee was cheaper if you only had a B/W set, the B/W fee was removed in the early 90s and as a consequence, trainloads of B/W sets found their way to illegal dumps and curbsides, it was a good time for TV hunting...

Today, the TV licensing fee is still here but it's basically no longer enforced, many newer households just don't pay it anymore.

[Bill R]

I'm just curious. If they have the right of entry to your house, what recourse if any do you have if they find none? Here that would cause a lot of lawsuits.

Bill R

[Mr Hoover]

There certainly used to be "TV Detector Vans" in the UK.
These would allegedly detect the local oscillator from a TV set's
tuner to show that the TV was in use.the "blip" on the spectrum
analyser was used as evidence in court.There was a large antenna
on the top of the van,think this has now been abandoned.

Here in Portugal there used to be a TV licence,very few people paid it
and it was abandoned in the early 1990's.

If one has a satellite dish all the UK terrestrial TV channels can be
viewed in parts of Western Europe for free!!

There was mention on BBC Radio 4 recently of a guy having a lot of
"aggravation" from the agency that now enforces the collection.

Till 1971 you needed a radio licence as well but they gave this up

Hugh