TV Licence
 

Hi all.

Back in April I decided that as there was very little worth (in my opinion) watching on Freesat and Freeview TV after giving up on SKY HD+ many years ago that I made my decision to cancel my TV licence and moved over to On Demand, Catchup, Pluto TV & Amazon Prime type viewing.

I was just wondering had anybody else cancelled their TV Licence's mainly because of endless repeats and poor qulaity programming on Terrestial TV ?

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I know of many that have cancelled. However you you still watch on BBC iplayer then you still need one. Or if on Amazon you watch live sports you need one.

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Haven't watched BBC iPlayer for well over a year on any BBC channels for that matter.

Don't watch anything live on Amazon, only Box sets or things like Star Trek Picard etc.

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Since going full time on IPTV that gives me top quality access to EVERYTHING for only £2-3 a month I plan to cancel my TV licence along with everything Virginmedia when I have got FTTP installed early next year.

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IPTV ?

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You can dump the TV licence only if you NEVER do the following:

1) Watch anything that is Live (INCLUDING Live streams on YouTube or other such platforms).

2) Watch anything on a broadcast OR streamed channel that has a published schedule.

3) Watch anything on BBC iPlayer (using BBC Sounds is OK).

Also expect to be pestered non-stop by TV licencing for the fact you don't have a licence.

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TV over broadband and in this case it's not legal but I don't care.

---------- Post added at 15:16 ---------- Previous post was at 15:12 ----------

You can dump the TV licence easily, no one's going to stop me watching an alternative source, and you don't get pestered all the time(so I'm told), there is no law saying you have to let the TV licence people into your home.

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That bit is false. Watching a live YouTube stream only counts if it is also broadcast live elsewhere, like Sky News etc.

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The rule is you need a tvl if you are watching or recording anything as it's being broadcast or watching anything on bbc iplayer.
You can still watch on demand content from itvx, 4,5, now, netflix, amazon, tubi, pluto etc.
If a goon ever does turn up it's a simple "hello who are you?" goon "i'm from tvl" you "no thankyou" and close the door it's as simple as that, you will get a monthly threatening letter but just bin them tvl can't do anything unless you drop yourself in it.
I do not endorse breaking the law btw but as long as you don't give tvl the power then they have no power.
Look up Chilli Jon Carne on youtube and Blackbelt barrister, they have loads of useful videos about tvl.

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As long as you are sure about that:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BcHDkBGcv9M

Also be aware that, following someone vesting a FOI request on the BBC regarding information gathering by TV licencing, that they are now also using third party data as well as BBC data on internet usage.

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They legally can not get the details of who ip address belongs to without a court order and those are extremly rare for this.

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I've told TVL earlier in the year that following advice from BlackBelt Barrister that I have withdrawn TVL's "Implied Right of Access" to anywhere on my property and I have had a letter from TVL acknowledging that fact that if a TVL "goon" turns up at my door then that is an "Act of Deliberate Trespass".

I don't watch any live TV anyway now so I'm safe and it's stopped the barrage of TVL threatning letters to zero.

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Tell it to the bloke that knocks at the door, not us ! ;)

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I doubt you are correct. Are you saying I can't watch a live stream of a spaceX launch fro the US or something a vid cast from Ukraine or Austrailia?

Good luck in getting a licence free off me for that. Its a non starter.

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Live broadcast of network TV if it is a station channel you are meant to pay the licence fee irrelevant of the origin country

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Which would be none of the live streams I've mentioned.

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Which is exactly what I mentioned. You can watch live YouTube as long as it's not also a channel like Sky News or anything. But got told I was wrong.

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I was simply clarifying the law not saying they were . Stopped paying my license years ago now

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Exactly you was correct, i posted the exact rules too as per tvl webpage and official sources but nobody seems to take notice mate.

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I've recently cancelled my TV licence, but what's confusing me is I've just had 2 emails saying they're refunding me £15.03(my last direct debit) and £87.26, so why are they refunding me this much when I pay the licence monthly?

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Take the win, dont question it. :D

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Because when you first set it up you paid higher figures for the first 6 months to get ahead and was always paying in advance since then. Everyone on DD get the refund

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That's good, I'm wondering if they will refund to my bank account because they cancelled the direct debit on 1st April when they took the £15.03, how did they refund you and how long did it take once you had email notification?

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They can still bacs all went into my bank been a while since I did it so I can not remember. I do remember it was easier for me to change the name on the license by saying I have been gender reassigned that it was to actually take my ex wifes name off it and put mine on<<<< that is a true story

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Thx for the info Miss Jaymoss miss. :D

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£102.29 received from the refund, happy days.

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The only way to avoid paying ahead is if you pay quarterly iirc

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yes

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Stopped paying the TV license years ago.
Now just have one subscription to Netflix.


I got sick of the repeats and sky high prices at Sky, and then realised I hardly watched live Tv any more.

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I guess I just pay for Prime now but that's part of my subscription for deliveries and cloud photo storage and to avoid the atrocious ads and now just use my IPTV service for everything.

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Take this with a pinch of salt but a few tabloids have a report that the TV Licence is looking to include Amazon Prime and Netflix subscriptions as a reason for needing a TV Licence!

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You'll need one to open your fridge soon

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Or literally owning a TV.

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Or not owning a TV, as in Germany.

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Oh that's bad I didn't think it could be anything worse than the UK but it's far worse.

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Even thats up for interpretation.
I can watch any streaming channel on my PC monitor, not technically a TV, but acting as one.

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Even CRT monitors could do that. A TV is just a monitor with display source provided from elsewhere, eg a camera(CCTV) or a tuner.

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Looking at a few definitions of Television and Television is the electronic broadcast and the equipment used to receive said broadcast so on that basis a Mobile phone a Laptop and Tablet anything that receives a broadcast ( internet can be included when you look at the definition of broadcast ) is a Television. Time for a new definition me thinks

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Possibly anyone who has an interweb connection, or pays council tax, or income tax. Its easily added. Change is coming but it will mean a lot more paying than they currently do. Pay up and be happy :)

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I do not pay and am happy

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BBC Considers Locking Down iPlayer For Viewers Who Refuse To Pay Licence Fee.

Bring it on is all I say, this and them considering a charge for radio listeners will just dig their grave quicker.

https://deadline.com/2026/07/bbc-loc...ee-1236999987/

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I can live quite happily without a TV, and if I was single I'd revert back to once again doing so.
The only radio I occasionally listen to is Radio Caroline over the internet, and if I'm honest, even the BBC News website now just gets a cursory glance without bothering to read any of the garbage on it . . which is then repeated further down under the remarkable headings of "most read" and "most watched" in some kind of TikTok style :rolleyes:

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Since cancelling my license I haven't even used a BBC account for anything the only BBC thing I use is their website.

Still waiting for the knock on the door from them, but as I'm usually in work(shift depending) I don't expect I'll ever be home if they do knock.

---------- Post added at 11:25 ---------- Previous post was at 11:22 ----------

All I need to do now is cancel Amazon Prime because I only really use the free shipping option, but I think I can get around that by delivering to a post office.

Well I live in the states and I guess you could say I cancelled my licence for DirecTV/Cable many years ago mainly for the same reason you did.. Nothing but Rubbish out there now,why pay for that??

I wonder how many people still pay the TV licence where you guys are and how many are actually getting it FREE..(Not paying)

I heard they have vans drive about and cheque for certain freqs and if one is detected,they know your watching TV... (Like a CRT TV gives off a signal around 550khz)

But they dont know exactly what your viewing.. You could be playing a game or watching VHS or DVD...

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Maybe 20 years ago.
In the UK, almost no one will be using one now, they stopped making them 10 - 15 years ago.

Ah so it would be bad if they did Paul huh??

It would stand out like a soar thumb!!

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I thought the TV detector vans were said to be fake.

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That’s a conspiracy theory based on the fact that nobody was ever convicted based on TV detector van evidence.

They were a real thing, the documentary evidence is vast, and the claims sometimes made that the vans and documentation around them was just one massive psyop really isn’t credible.

The reality though is that they weren’t very accurate and at best gave enforcers a pointer as to which unlicenced houses to knock at. Then as now it’s almost always confession evidence that does it. The vans were a starting point and a deterrent, as they were quite visible.

I was trying to find a picture of the inside of these vans,im sure its quite hi-tech in there!

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I don't think it would've taken very hi-tech kit to spot who was watching TV in those days. You could see the tell-tale signs of flickering light from a TV.

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There's RGB lighting to hide behind now ;)

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Thing is though back in the days of yore before the days and even including the early days of Sky we had a lot more quality and less of a reason to not want to fund the BBC. Of course also at this time they were covering up vile acts but still

Re: TV Licence
 

Not really - just a receiver capable of picking up interference pumped out by an old-fashioned CRT screen. A directional antenna would assist with working out which house it was coming from. If it seemed that signal was coming from an address that did not have a TV licence, they’d get a knock at the door.

It wasn’t a pointless exercise back in the mid-late 20th century because a measurable number of homes genuinely didn’t have a TV and therefore no TV licence. It’s only from the mid 80s onwards that you could argue that you legitimately owned and used a TV without receiving broadcasts, with home VCRs becoming popular.

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The law was just owning a TV I remember being asked for my address when I bought one once so they could report it to them

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I remember clamping one 20 years ago, a very satisfying day

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Old CRTs had very leaky intermediate RF circuits that could be picked up yards away. From tuning into a single frequency, detector vans could tell not only that you had a TV on, but what channel you were watching at the time.

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It's also said that, if their evidence was used in court, those being prosecuted would have the right to cross examine this evidence and this would disclose information that TVL don't want to get into the public domain.

A retired and trustworthy TV engineer has told me in the past that he was shown inside one and that it wasn't fake. However, maybe this conspiracy came about because some were empty inside?? TVL have long said that simply parking a branded TVL van up in various places resulted in a spike of TVL's being purchased in that area :D

---------- Post added at 14:26 ---------- Previous post was at 14:17 ----------

You could test this yourself by holding a portable radio near to the television, made a horrendous noise.

Wow I didnt reaiise that!

I gather that only worked if you were using the TV TUNER and not a cable box?

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Until cable in the UK went digital (early 2000s), the boxes provided were just frequency converters that changed the incoming cable VHF channel to a fixed UHF channel tuned on the TV. Hence the IF circuit would still be working & leaking the channel output.

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They used to transmit UHF down the cable you could just an adapter plug it into the TV in and get terrestrial. They transmitted FM too Well NTL did round here anyway

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Many, many decades ago, my late brother had a TV which for some reason had a built-in cable tuner. He had moved somewhere which had an early version of cable TV, so as an experiment he connected the TV to the cable feed, which, oddly enough was live.

He was able to get the FTA channels, and also, with a bit of scanning, get some of the ‘premium’ channels. Obviously, back in those days nothing was encrypted and could just be picked up by anyone with the right equipment - presumably it was assumed that this would be so few people that they could be ignored.

Wasn’t this how the original BSB went out of business?

I vaguely recall an ‘advert’ for the licence fee, showing an operator in a detector van, reporting that a person in a particular address didn't have a licence, but were watching TV, and, he checked watch, were watching ‘Columbo’!

The detector vans, sort of worked but could never pin down a particular address, so were more of a deterrent than anything else. Then as now, were someone to knock on your door claiming that you are watching TV without a licence and they need to come in and check, you are certainly within your rights to refuse entry and close the door on them.

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BSB didn’t go out of business (not officially anyway). BSB and Sky were both loss-making at the time of their merger, though it’s likely Sky would probably have pulled through without BSB in the end. BSB failed because the satellite tech it opted for required a ton of broadcast power and had room for fewer channels. With the whole premise of subscription TV being quantity of channels, it was always going to look like the poor relation to Sky. The other fatal flaw was in the way spectrum was allocated to national satellite broadcasters in Europe. BSB was the ‘official’ UK broadcaster and occupied the frequencies allocated to the UK. But Rupert Murdoch simply acquired spectrum allocated to Luxembourg and launched a system that was cheaper to buy. He created a competitive market for satellite TV that was never meant to exist and BSB wasn’t designed to resist.

Wow I didnt realise that,thank you!!

Interesting..... Sounds like CRTs didnt didnt keep quiet!

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NTL was putting out all 5 public service channels on UHF frequencies you could tune on a TV directly, at least in Hemel Hempstead in the early 2000s it was because that’s what we used. There was no rooftop aerial on our first house and while there had been no active sub to cable in the house for years the wall box was still there and still connected to the tap in the street cab.

When the BBC started launching ‘digital channels’ as they were once known (like BBC 3) these were also available to us on analogue UHF this way. Occasionally cable-only channels were also receivable, like L!ve TV, which wasn’t much of a bonus TBH. :D

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The adapter I meant was just to change the cable connector from screw to rf :-) it was the same for us too. The NTL wall boxes had a separate FM connector you could use on your amp

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Yes, I never tried out the FM hookup though the person we bought the house from said it worked. She kindly left behind the F-to-aerial adapter she’d been using for TV.

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Hemel headend had at one time 8 analogue channels you could tune directly via the converters UHF bypass. BBC1 London, BBC2 London, ITV London, ITV Anglia, Channel 4, Channel 5, West Herts TV (Local channel with a studio on the top floor of Comtel's building on the Maylands estate, which closed when NTL took over) & a rolling programme guide. The cable VHF spectrum could only accomodate around 35 analogue channels, so when additional capacity was required, UHF spectrum was used (hence you could tune some of these channels directly on a TV if NTL had not removed the sync pulses).

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As we're talking about analogue TV... even when digital cable was introduced some cablecos kept the analogue TV signals running down their cable alongside the digital signals until the late 2000s I think. These old cable set-top boxes from that era had an internal analogue tuner which would decode and output those unencrypted analogue RF feeds directly to your TV from PSBs like BBC and ITV. I recall someone saying that it was theft to get these channels if you no longer subscribed to cable TV but still had your box which remained connected to the cabinet.

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I think this is drifting off topic somewhat. :)