The BBC is closing the 'loophole' for iPlayer catch-up
Does this have any implications for normal viewing?
How will the iPlayer service know if you have a licence or not?

Mark

Probably the same way as terrestrial knows if you have a licence or not, they will turn up at your door and if you don't have a licence, but you have an Internet connection and a PC, smartphone, game console or DVD recorder etc. then you will get fined...

Use your licence number as a type of loggin?

How would you verify that the person typing the number in is the person who owns the licence? IIRC I think you can manage your TV licence online, can't remember if there's a password on that, although I hope so.

They can't use the same argument with PCs, tablets etc they use with TVs. A TV really doesn't have that many other uses than watching TV programmes. I imagine there are people who use a TV as a display for netflix client but I imagine they're very few at least currently. There are a myriad of uses for a PC or smartphone that are nothing to do with anything the licence fee relates to.

If they turned up at my door and said "you don't have a licence but you have a laptop, you need to get one" I'd tell them to [LIFTED] off. What if you have a laptop as part of your job?

Jon

"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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In Germany, if you have a PC and an Internet connection, you have to pay the licence fee. You have the ability to live stream the national stations, so you have to have a licence. That goes for businesses as well - although they only need a single licence, not one for every PC in the building.

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

Even now though there isn't a rule that says owning a tv means you have to have a tv licence.

I have my tv. I don't have a tv licence.


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'rule of thumb' has a specific meaning.