this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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I can't believe the TV license is real. I just can't. I guess it helps makes good tv tho
Americans fund public TV and radio infrastructure through taxes, Brits just make it opt-out if you meet certain criteria by labeling it as a license.
You tell me which has more "freedom."
The one where I don't have to upload my I.D. to watch porn, BABY! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦅🦅
I'll just leave this here https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/porn-site-verification-states
Sometimes I forget how much freedoms we have in Washington State. The only thing is strict gun laws, but it's mostly background checks and limited magazine sizes
well I live in Georgia (US state) who brought it in before the UK did.
The TV license is definitely real. All the others are fake though (I believe).
https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence
Wtf is this in addition to paying for cable/satellite?
Nope. You can just plug your TV into the aerial to get BBC + free channels. Netflix and whatever costs extra tho
I’m surprised that according to the website, they actually let you get away without a license if you only use commercial streaming services and don’t watch any BBC content. In Germany, that excuse doesn’t fly. As long as your device has the capacity to receive aerial broadcast, you have to pay, whether you watch it or not is irrelevant.
afaik in Germany you even have to pay if you have no device that to receive anything. Every household has ro pay wirth a few exeptions.
Pretty sure not owning ANY broadcast receiving devices is the only way to get around it, but that’s extremely difficult to accomplish. Keep in mind radio counts as well (though you can be eligible for a reduced rate if you only have radio access and no TV), including the one in your car, your stereo, or your alarm clock. Owning a TV with no antenna hooked up does not count either, since it’s trivial to do so, and you could just be hiding an antenna in your attic or your basement.
Basically, the only way to legally skirt the fee is to live under a bridge or in a forest without any electronic devices besides a flash lamp.
I mean we have free over the air TV here in the states too, just don’t need a loicense for it
Do people elsewhere in the world pay for “cable” tv? I know we had a version here in Australia but it was so rare, no one really used it.
It was pretty big over here in the US, and still is with Gen X and older. Nowadays, pretty much the only reasons to get it are if you’re a sports fan or enjoy brainrot 24/7 news networks
Brexit really was a mistake
The long knife prohibition is real.
The early idea was to support the state-owned and state-operated channels through taxes. Then the channels got privatized and now the taxes are going straight into the pockets of The Brexit Bunch. I mean why would they voluntarily cut off a money source that people were already paying.
In San Diego they had a toll bridge.. once it was paid for they kept the toll. When asked why they were still charging a toll... They said the toll booths still cost money to run. They had to be sued for the toll to stop
Having to charge toll because they need money to run the toll booths is the most Kafkaesque thing I have heard in a while.
This is/was a thing in many other European countries too.
In Austria it used to be (not long ago, a few years at most) that only people who owned a TV needed to pay it, not anymore, now every household has to pay it, so it is basically a household tax.
It's not a tax tho? At least not in Germany. It's going directly to the state-broadcasting service but unconditionally; the idea being it's harder to influence the content or threaten them with cutting off their funding.
This is also the case in Austria according to https://orf.beitrag.at/faq/allgemein so whether to call that a "tax" or not is purely a terminological question. It used to be that this was only required for owning a TV, but this was hard to enforce because there was no automatic legal requirement to let inspectors into one's home and companies started to produce TVs without a TV tuner (i.e. could only stream from the Internet) to get around this.