Over 1000 jobs are to go at the BBC – far more than originally thought – because “more than one million fewer people had a television set than was predicted in 2011”.
What? Are people throwing their TV’s in the bin?
No, no they’re not. Whether you like the BBC or not, in the UK we’ve got it good. We have a range of channels including a 24 hour news channel, childrens channels and local programming. We also have well-made home-grown TV shows, series and films. Heck, we even had something called “Top Gear” until Jeremy Clarkson went all crazy.
We have local radio stations, national radio stations and they’re all available right now on TV, radio, tablets, smartphones and elsewhere. Satellite, cable, over 3G, 4G and WiFi.
The TV licence fee pays for the BBC, and a colour TV / radio licence costs £145.50 (around £12.13) per month.
The best part? There’s no adverts, ever. You also get to watch and listen to programmes on the iPlayer too – there’s a massive library. Again, no adverts.
Compare this to Sky TV, where the basic package (which has 35 channels) is £20 per month, or £240 per year. For that you don’t get nearly the same amount of UK-based programming and you get the adverts too.
However, if I’m to return to those job losses for a moment, they’re not due to people throwing their TV’s away. They’re due to people exploiting a massive and almost ridiculous loophole.
If you don’t watch live television – via any means – then you have no need for a Television Licence.
You are quite within your rights to not pay for the licence fee, so you’d think that would mean that you can’t or won’t watch the BBC. In the “old days” there used to be guys in vans detecting whether you had a TV. If you did, and you didn’t have a licence, you’d be in trouble. Now we’re in a more modern era, and things are decidedly more tricky. You don’t have to have a licence for that lovely flatscreen TV and – even crazier – you can still watch the BBC. The loophole allows catch-up services, including BBC iPlayer.
This basically means that, as someone living in the UK without a licence, you can watch and listen to all that BBC content on the iPlayer. Again, no adverts. It’s effectively completely free entertainment without any payment from you or advertising to support it.
If we’re honest, this has to be a tipping point. The BBC has to perhaps come up with a solution – like other channels (such as Fox, UK Gold, Sky Atlantic etc etc), where channels are part of a paid-for package. As for the radio stations, who knows. I enjoy listening to advert-free stations, and perhaps in the future the technology will let us pay for that, rather than dodging through a loophole and, let’s face it, continuing to listen anyway.