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| Fogmeister wrote: "A tv really doesn't have that many other uses than watching tv programmes." I've had my tv for 4 years and it has never been used to watch a tv programme. My main/only use for it is as a display for my Xbox. I was Netflix on it from time to time but I have never had a broadcast signal go into it. I rarely watch iplayer and by the looks of it I'll be uninstalling it soon. | |
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People who hang around obscure internet forums are not great anecdotal evidence. There are millions of homes with TVs in the UK. At some point in the future a significant portion of them will use TVs purely as monitor screens for streaming services and/or other media. Right now, I suspect the people fitting that pattern are a fraction of a percent.
Fundamental point - I don't actually see the 'if you have a TV you probably should have a TV licence' to be that unpalatable as a basic rule of thumb. I don't think 'if you have an iPad you probably should have a TV licence' holds at all. So they're going to have to come up with some other logic behind deciding who the licence fee applies to if they want to bring streaming under the auspices of TV licencing.
They could of course do it by changing the law so (say) any streaming service also counts if that service supplies any content originally produced by the BBC. After all, they can change the law to whatever they want to. They could also in theory just say 'every residential property in the UK needs a TV licence' (in reality there's not a cat in hell's chance of a tory administration actually doing that). In any case, making anything that has a display subject to the licence fee is a very dumb way of doing it.
Jon