Friday 23 August 2013

Out of date TV licence

I got a letter through the post last month to remind me that my TV licence was about to expire and I needed to buy a new one, my first thought 'oh yet another thing I have to pay for' and then I got wondering, why do I need to pay for a TV licence? I mean I already pay extortionate prices to be able to have hundreds of channels (which I barely do watch) on my screen already, why am I paying extra just to watch a few BBC channels??

When the TV licence was first introduced there was basically 1 channel to watch - the BBC, so you were paying to watch 100% of the TV channels!
Now however there are around 200 channels and if you include all the news, international, gaming, shopping and adult channels that's probably another 200 bringing it to 400 channels. Compare this to the amount of BBC stations; there are 8 in total (not including the radio) that amounts to 2% of the channels available!!

There are thousands of people being taken to court every week for evading the £145.50 charge of an annual licence (or £49 for a black and white licence, but who really has one of those nowadays?) So I ask myself, shouldn't we really have a choice of whether we want to pay the fee? Should we opt in to subscribe to the BBC like we do to the movie channels? I mean personally the only thing I watch religiously on the BBC is Eastenders and we all know that's the most miserable thing on there and they would be doing me a favour if they took it away from me!

Or on the other hand how about they just put adverts on like they do on every other channel, it gives us that 3 minute break to run to the loo, make a cup of tea or raid the cupboards for chocolate (OK, maybe that's not a good idea) and compared to the advert breaks I had to recently endure while in Spain our ones are nothing. The programmes cut off mid sentence and '6 minutes' appears on the screen (in Spanish) to indicate that you now have to watch 6 minutes of adverts then after the programme returns for 2 minutes it pops up again saying '7 minutes' now that's probably why they have siestas in the afternoon, out of boredom from sitting through all the TV adverts!

If the choice was yours what would you choose?:
TV licence
Subscription
Adverts

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