Radio reception has not needed a license for many years now. Not sure whether only since the 2003 Act, or whether it was before that.
When my father got his first car in 1965, he took the radio out of it because it wasn't covered on the TV licence like the rest of the radios in the house.
It quite easy to understand. terrestrial TV is piped to all houses as an open access service, there is no firewall to stop people, unlike Netflix. So the whole thing is taken on trust.
The only way to tell if you arent watching is to check periodically.
Once you lose free to air public service broadcasting you are at the mercy of private sector media and that is a dangerous road to go down. As standards slip and impartiality is lost.
The point of the BBC is to provide quality broadcasting and minority broadcasting that wouldn't be commercially viable if it were left to the market, like subsidising the Royal Opera House etc, which we don't hear many complaints about.
the quality of the programming seems in a death-spiral, with increasing amounts of dumbed-down, lowest-common-denomenator, mass-culture-pedalling dross.
They're scared they'll lose the licence fee if they don't copy the commercial stations.
The weird thing is how all parties blame the BBC of bias.
Journalists' philosophy is that if you're getting stick from all sides you've got it about right.
How do you stick the frustration? Catchup TV off the internet has got to be the most infuriating way to watch telly there is. The cue & review functions are as user unfriendly as it's possible to get, and every other time I try to use it I have to go to the laptop, boot it up, and use it to login in.
Again.
And again and again.
After having been told each time that
"You'll only have to do this once".
