No idea. I stopped paying my licence fee years ago. It got to the point where I would only watch Top Gear, Robot Wars (the return), Doctor Who, and a few BBC4 docs. It wasn't worth it after they went down hill.

Yes, but you need a license to watch ANY live TV in the UK, not just BBC.

The Tories took over.

Wouldnt streaming next day be fine then ?

If you're watching via iPlayer, then you also legally have to pay the license fee.

It's not your grandfather's BBC anymore.

on a mission tryna find mister Warren G

There's something funny about the BBC reporting on themselves being weird

How much is the license fee?

It seems like the fee would be an incentive to switch to streaming, with a VPN if necessary.

Yeah, it's legal to stream anything after it's been shown live (although a license fee is needed if using iPlayer)

However, if you want to watch live sports, then you'll have to somehow avoid seeing the results.

While the overall institution is the BBC the divisions are largely separate and the BBC News division is meant to be bound by its charter to present news of public interest and the BBC being a shit show certainly qualifies.

On paper, it is better than other approaches in which a media company will just flat-out ignore controversies or fuck ups that it has a hand in.

But it also gets used by people to wrongly state that because the BBC criticizes itself now and again that it just be 100% impartial and not at all biased.

£159 per year if you watch live broadcast TV, watch content on the BBC I-Player streaming service, or just generally watch live streams of shows on the likes of Amazon Prime, Now, Sky Go, All 4 etc.

It was a good idea back in the day of very few channels on TV as it helped pay for some great content that on paper was free from the usual pressures and it ensured that across the BBC channels, you had pretty much every base covered from Kids TV to News, Education, Sport, Drama, Comedy, Documentaries, Art, Religion etc.

But as competing channels became available through the likes of satellite and cable and then the internet came along with streaming the license fee has become increasingly contentious, especially as it racks up political scandals that call into question its impartiality.

Under the current Tory government, the plan is that the fee is being scrapped in 2027 and the BBC will have to sink or float like any other media company. The Tories will claim that this is to save the public money while people who hate the Tories will claim that its because they want to remove a source of media that on paper should be impartial and critical of them when required, as well as the usual motives of personal gain from handing their donors and friends contracts worth hundreds of millions.

Whether that will happen or not is unknown as the current Tory government is very unlikely to win the next election which has to happen by January 2025 at the latest. Labour who are widely expected to win the next election has been critical of the Tories intending to scrap the fee while at the same time not exactly stating what their own position will be, giving some wishy-washy answers that may or may not see the BBC continue as it does currently.

I myself am planning to scrap my license and TV package later this year when my contract runs out and switch to streaming services only. I barely watch live TV these days maybe 3-4 hours total per week and even then it's not content I care enough about to pay the fee for.

Alternatively just don't pay it.

Fuck the BBC

Some good old fashion sabotage

This is what happens when a company prioritizes virtue signaling over running its actual business. It is a recurring theme in 2023 across many industries at this point.

what exactly do you mean by "virtue signaling"?

I know what the phrase means but what in BBC programming do you think is virtue signaling?

> 100% impartial and not at all biased

Government run news organization is unbiased

Is it the british accent and monotone delivery that confuses people into thinking it's not like every other news organization these days, a joke

BBC News isn't government-run.

You tell yourself whatever you want

Leadership literally appointed by the state, yo it's not government run!!

Brainwashed completely, hey did you know 1984 was partly inspired by orwell's time at the bbc, little snapple fact

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Not directly no but in recent years changes were made to the BBC board and since then a disproportionate number of BBC higher-ups have active ties to the Tory party and some have even stated that they joined to intentionally cancel programming that is critical of the Tory party, Brexit and Trump.

There is also the issue of BBC staff admitting that they purposefully allowed biased broadcasts to occur frequently during the 2014 Scottish Independence campaign because BBC staff felt like "We had a duty to defend the integrity of the Union".

BBC News is most of the time more balanced than the majority of other News Outlets. However, when there are elections or a "Non-Binding" Referendum coming up, they are wildly pro Tory.

Read the Wikipedia article on humans. Same vibes lol

This sure feels like a W1A episode.

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Wokeism?

You know hiring people, promoting people not on talent but rather tokenism.

Creating content not that people want but is Woke. You know every story is focused on a minority with an agenda.

That’s the problem.

Only someone who hasn’t followed anything that’s happened there in the last 12 years would say that. Richard Sharp, Laura Kuenssberg, Fiona Bruce, Robbie Gibb, Tim Davie.

Is "Wokeism" responsible for Tories threatening the BBC over a presenter's tweets about their policies? Did it lead to the crashes on Top Gear? To the consideration to stop funding the choir? Is it through wokeism that the new chairman of the BBC was appointed, or was it because he's a banker with connections to the Conservative party and Boris Johnson, personally?

Did you even read the article?

Plain and simple. Government interference.