Brits refuse to pull plug on B&W TVs!
 

they have to pay a fee to own a tv? or am i reading that wrong?

That last picture with the "60 year old telly" looks more like it was made in 1960.
Bill Cahill

Binatone Visionstar...? Make that 1980. No way is that a tube set.

ETA: Binatone celebrated 50 years in business in 2009 so the math doesn't work either.

I think they got the captions mixed up, maybe they meant that Bush TV was 60 years old?

I think so, it was the only 60 year old looking one there. Cool that they're still using those old sets:yes:

It sounds as though you need a license to own a TV WTF! Are there any limey's around to confirm this? (I'm 100% British American (back over 250 years though) so I figure this isn't rascist). I think antique radios has a few more overseas patrons. Maybe I'll try there.

The license fees fund the BBC, and a b/w license is almost £100 cheaper than color. I believe the license entitles you to receive television broadcasts. No fee is owed for merely owning an inoperative TV or using a TV only to watch recorded content.

Phil Nelson

In Europe, license fees for owning a radio or TV pay for part of the programming. I'm not sure how it works in Britain, but in Germany and Switzerland there is a periodic fee or tax to be paid. If you don't pay it, someone can actually come and investigate whether you have a radio or TV.

Holy crap...the biggest shocker is that they need a license to watch television? Ill be waiting for that conformation too.

Then again that would make sense since television is state run in the UK.

Phil said the license fee is 100 pounds less for a B & W TV. That's like $200-$250 bucks less! to watch TV before the cable companies or service providers get invoved. I'm sure the europeans aren't just watching the homegrown BBC or whatever they have in the rest of europe. If I were in that position I'd be pirating everything under the sun. Sooner or later this will hit the US TV industry and Hollywood pretty big time unless they have already made deals with those european broadcasters. Maybe it already has.

Yes, you need a TV license in the UK. Fortunately, though, it is a "per household" license, not a per-set one, so collectors there are not going broke. Get the details at http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/

No, that is correct, the UK has had a licence (British English spelling) fee for television since the beginning of television service, and used to have a licence fee just for radio.

It was established to fund the BBC.

It is interesting that only the UK is well known for its licensing program, when, in fact, the vast majority of countries in Europe and Africa have them


@pugs5061: You're showing your age (I, too, remember when a Pound was USD $2.40, which made a penny (then, 1/12th of a shilling) the same as America's "penny".

Today (30 May 2010), £100 less is only $144.71 less then colour.

And it's the government that collects this fee, and then funds the broadcaster? Sounds like that broadcaster better not say nothin' bad about the government or else the government cuts off the funding. :scratch2: We in the USA would never tolerate that situation. We have laws that specifically forbid the government from broadcasting domestically (Voice of America is for foreign listeners, but we still can hear it spilling inside the USA, but almost nobody in the USA ever listens to shortwave anyway). We take our first amendment seriously. :yes:
---------------------------------------------
I'm pretty sure this doesn't violate the "no politics" rule, as everyone agrees that the first amendment is a good thing, conservatives, liberals, democrats, republicans.

I am showing my age. OK $144 less then. (I always use to use $2.50).:smoke: This is all new to me though. Glad things are different here:yes:

Hello,

yes, it is alright. British people have to pay a fee for owning a tv set and receiving public television.

In Germany, we also have to pay a fee of 5,76 € a month for owning a radio anmd listen to the radio program, and 12,22 € a month for owning a tv set and watching television. As a result, the public television program of the publich broadcast corporations is commercial-free, except the time between 6 and 8 o'clock in the evening. But there are no interuptions by commercials in movies, sports and so on. Since 1984, we also have private tv programs which are funded only by commercials, but the quality of these programs are not as well as the quality of the fee-funded public programs.

In Britain, b/w tv is cheaper than color tv. Here in Germany, there is no difference between color and b/w.

- Eckhard

...

I recall something along the lines that an area/house can be surveyed by an equipped vehicle that detects the local oscillator running inside your set. I imagine there's fines involved for operating illegally.

Yep. And they used to go around at night & look for the tell-tale bluish glow of a telly operating...

From what I've seen (and heard), the BBC is one of the most honest, straighforward and no-BS broadcasters on Earth.

once upon a time in pre TV days Canada had similar license scheme for radios...you'll see them pop up on Ebay every now and then,old radios with the last yearly govt license still stapled inside the cabinet

i was talking to an older friend just the other day who remembers this from the 30/40's.seems to me he said it was 11 bucks a year...not a fortune but not an insignificant sum in those days,apparently the local radio repair guy collected it[and likely got a small cut for his trouble]

The host of "Connections", James Burke, had a great line concerning the license.

"We didn't see anything wrong with taxation without representation. The BBC wouldn't exist without it!" :lmao:

At least it's not one per set, that would make it nearly impossible to collect tvs.

So are they broadcasting analog or digital now? I know they needed a converter to 405-lines to operate the old sets already, now another one for digital to analog too? I used to think how much better off we were here needing no converters, but now with the digital converter boxes and all my modulators I suppose I'm not really any better off. I know the Canadians still have it good, because I'm still getting their ch9 (but I don't think that will last for long either)

As a few others have pointed out, the BBC is recognized worldwide as one of the most impartial news organizations around.

When I lived in Switzerland, I paid the TV license fee to an outfit called Billag. Seemed to be a private agency contracted to handle the collection of licensing fees. You can read a little about how it works here at the bottom of this page: http://switzerland.angloinfo.com/cou...zerland/tv.asp

These fees are nothing new, and go back to the earliest days of radio broadcasting in Europe. Although some folks here find this a peculiar system, Europeans strongly prefer it, often making fun of how our TV shows are continually interrupted by commercials. They will even go so far as to say the American football is a game entirely built around the concept of continual interruption of the TV coverage. All the natural breaks in it work well for U.S.-style commercial TV.

I've got a number of old radios from Europe that have the PTT (post office - telephone - telegraph) license stickers on the back of them. In those days, you'd pay your fee and get a little stamp or sticker to put on the back of the radio itself. These days, with a fee per household instead of per unit, that system is no longer used.

I posted this once before when somebody mentioned "rules"...
I must be missing something... A while back, I noticed that many posters on this forum will not use the term "eBay" or will use a disclaimer such as "I am not associated with this auction" when posting a link to an eBay auction... I went looking for a videokarma rule section, to find out what is permitted with respect to eBay links. I could not find any rules. I have always tried to use common sense in posting, and hope that I have not offended anyone, but if there are specific rules posted somewhere, please direct me to their location.
Thanks!
jr

I've looked in the past and haven't found any rules either. A few of the forums like the classifieds have a sticky with rules, but they seem to be the exception.

John

I believe that the "Rules" are basically carried over from the Audiokarma side, as they would apply here.

You newbies to this site may not realize that Videokarma had split from the Audiokarma site to be more stand alone from the audio folks, but we are still under the same "umbrella".

Please correct me on this if I'm missing something here..

That's the best rule of all !

Here are the Audiokarma rules, for what they're worth: http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/sho...d.php?t=301366 .

I don't know whether they officially apply here, but as long as you try to be a good neighbor and keep your sense of humor intact, I doubt you'll run into any trouble, in this forum or others.

Phil

I've continued to follow the AK conventions (though there is no rule against using the term "eBay," and I personally find it a bit silly to dance around it). It seemed the simplest way to keep on the right side of the staff.

First of all, sorry about the "rules" hijack, and also thanks to those that responded !

Back to the orig thread:
I don't think that there is a caption error:
"Great grandad Les White, 88, from Barnehurst, Kent, still uses the 12-inch Binatone Visionstar TV he bought 60 YEARS ago.
Retired sub-postmaster Les says: "I bought this in 1950 and it's just as good now as it was then. The sound is perfect.
"It was the first TV I bought for my first home with my wife Wendy. I didn't get a colour set when they were introduced. In fact it was not until the Seventies that I upgraded."

I suspect that he has a "false memory" of the event... over an extended time period the human brain often combines several related events and perhaps dreams as well, into one story that makes sense, even though the actual events may have actually occurred years apart.

jr

That.

The BBC exists in an unusual and subtle relationship with the UK government. It operates under a Royal Charter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Charter at one remove from government. It is funded primarily by the licence fee, payable by every household that uses a TV to watch off-air broadcasts. http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/ In the age of multichannel TV the licence has become increasingly controversial but nobody has yet devised a better method. The B&W licence is an anachronism and I suspect it will be abolished when digital switchover is complete in 2012.

The BBC frequently criticises the government and in turn the government criticicises the BBC about bias. Governments of all political hues usually want to bash the BBC but the British people usually trust the BBC rather more than their government.

BBC World and other non-UK services are funded either by advertising or by a direct grant from the government. The government specifies the extent of services (eg it can say "we want a service in Arabic") but the BBC has editorial independence. I suspect there is sometimes considerable tension between the BBC and government when there is news that the government doesn't like. The BBC won its reputation during WW2 by broadcasting bad news as well as good (this is a gross simplification) and has no wish to lose it, along with its global audience, by becoming a simple mouthpiece for the government.

Good day Gentlemen,

Here's the situation in France. We have several licence-funded government TV channels (France 2, France 3, France 4, France 5 + ARTE, the Franco-German common channel). Advertising is only between programs (no cuts) and recently has been totally banned in the evening hours, i.e. after 8PM.

Interestingly, the TV licence collection used to employ 3500 + IRS employees. The government changed the law 5 years ago decreeing that all households would receive the TV tax along with the residency tax which you weither you own or rent the house you live in. If you do not own a TV, you can write and ask for exemption, but checks can be done.
The 3500 IRS employees now made redundant wre re-assigned elsewhere.

The annual fee is 116 Euros and is one of the lowest in Europe, this is why our public channels still have some advertising, as the licence allocation is not enough by itself to ensure full funding. Compare this with UK £220.00/year in England (ppppenguin please correct the figure if i'm wrong).

Best Regards

jhalphen
Paris/France

Imagine, I learned about the UK television license fees on "The Young Ones:"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn1Y7nhB16U

More recently, I saw a segment on "Trigger Happy TV" where Dom Joly had some child's toy and used it as a detector to confront people he accused of having unlicensed tv sets. Funny stuff, IMO. Just wish I could find the Trigger Happy clip.

Yes, and the fee for a B/W set is cheaper. Nothing wrong with that, you
have to pay a fee for owning a car, right?

As long as the Government has no power to change the fee, or divert
the funds to uses other than BBC funding, I think the BBC can be said
to be independent from the government, and this fact is generally
agreed on. Regards.

Never thought of it that way, reg fees for cars pay for roads like the reg fees for tv's pays for the broadcast.....fair enough i guess.

...

One of the advantages of a licence fee is that the beeb's programming is free from the disruption of adverts (though they are starting to adopt those annoying pop-ups that tell you whats on next grrr). Whilst the Government does initially get their grubby hands on the money before passing a portion of it on to the beeb, the beeb is free to criticise the government - any interference would cause an outcry.

I went back to a B&W licence a few years back now, when my modern colour set went seriously kaput. I relied upon a mid 60's dual standard B&W set, but because it wasn't a throw-away piece of junk I only switched it on when there was something I particularly wanted to watch. Most weeks I was down to <2 hours a week !

My mistake was buying a DVD player for elderly parent - the licence people saw the purchase (big brother!) and sent me a letter saying "You seem to have recently purchased a colour television ... " (followed by some carefully worded text that thinly disguised that they'd be sending the lads round to break my legs). Anyhow I contacted them but let slip that I had a VHS recorder. Since I could record from a colour terrestrial signal I had to have a colour licence, and as I needed a VHS recorded to modulate the set top box to UHF for ye olde telly, well, I went back to a modern colour (not monster flatscreen - shame on anyone who has one of those monstrosities)(Hi Jeffrey :nono::D:D).

Anyhow, the UK TV licence was introduced when the service resumed in 1946 (there was already a radio licence), but people who still had a current radio licence at that time could use their telly until that radio licence expired, so it was not until 1947 that licence figures truly reflected the number of sets in use (well, in theory!).

As for the "60 year old" 1980's Binatone, thats just owner's memory fade, however it is indicative of the lack of proper reserach that goes into reporting in general these days - certainly most of the newspapers are not to be considered reliable sources of information any more, but the beeb is considered reasonably good in this respect (though getting worse I'm afraid).

TTFN,
Jon

PS : @jhalphen, colour licence is currently £145.50