BBC Will Use Wi-Fi Detection Vans To Catch TV Pirates

As mentioned most of it is total BS to scare maybe 10% of those without a license to pay up.

The way it really works is very simple. They have a database of all the addresses that have a license and they then target the maybe 10% of addresses that don't have a license issued.

In my 45 years of living in the UK I have never seen a detector van or heard of anyone getting caught by one. In fact I know of no one that has ever been fined either.

I would like to state for the record I begrudge paying my license fee as I feel the BBC has dumbed down greatly over the past 10-15 years. It mainly caters to the 75 and below IQ range and their science programs/documantaries are a joke and a shadow of their 1970/80's versions. Brian Cox is a tool that just presents over-priced travelogues! We watch maybe an hour of BBC a week on average, if that. It's just not value for money for me. I also have Netflix and Prime and that caters to 95% of my viewing needs.
 
Anyone old enough to remember OnTV (guess from the early 80's)? If you stayed up late at night, you could sometimes see a boob on your tv (watched mild porn). We used to spend a lot of time trying to adjust our rabbit ear antennas to see the boob scenes. As a 9 year-ish old, it was totally worth it.
If you paid for OnTV, you were given a special OTA antenna that could unscramble to video signal. Well, it didn't take long for knock=off antennas to come out. The company would supposedly drive around looking for the unauthorized antenna and you were subject to criminal action if you had one. My parents never did, so we only got to see the occasional, partially scrambled nude scene.
 
Raxiel said:
They aren't cracking your wifi, hacking your firewall, or detecting anything. It's not 'government overreach' or 'fascism' because they aren't actually doing anything. Even if it were physically possible (which I dispute), we're talking about the kind of tech that MI5 or MI6 would deploy, its not going to be handed over to a couple of Oiks working for Crapita, everyone's least favourite lowest bidder government contractor.

It's a bluff, it was a bluff when they had the old vans with aerials on the roof for detecting CRT's and it's a bluff now.

They know most people watch TV, they know which households have a licence, and they know which houses are occupied (electoral register)

It's trivial to get a list of occupied houses without licences and they usually just try their luck, because as others have mentioned, they get a lot of people who panic and admit it when asked on the doorstep. The inspectors have no real power and you can tell them to get lost if they turn up at the door.

As it happens, I pay my TV licence. I pay it because I feel it is good value for money, we watch a lot of BBC output in our house (Mostly Cbeebees) and I hate adverts. I usually pay to remove ad's in any apps I use regularly too. I think having an Ad free network in the UK benefits everyone who watches TV here, even if they don't watch the BBC, because having ad free broadcasts to compare too stops the commercial stations pulling any of the obnoxious crap networks in other countries seem to get away with.
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This, all of it.

I cant stand many adverts, I have to turn the sound off because they continually drive into your skull, not in a good way.
For the money the BBC is good value compared to any other TV service and the BBC produce some of the worlds best quality programming.
But this has been on the decline for some time and there are a lot of repeats.
I am pissed with the huge waste and arrogance coming from the top of the organisation, get a grip guys!

I do find it strange that its a criminal offence to not have a TV license if you watch "any" kind of broadcast, but I understand why this is the status quo.
I strongly believe this...
If the general quality decline, lack of care for what is spent & where and the indifference of the directors and managers to these issues continue, they deserve to have this status removed.
From a long term license payer.
 
Nothing new. British law is that the air waves are NOT FREE. You must pay if you receive a signal on your TV.

 
The total income from licence fees was £3.735 billion in 2014–15[5] of which £613.4 million or 16.4% was provided by the Government through concessions for those over the age of 75. Thus, the licence fee made up the bulk of the BBC's total income of £4.805 billion in 2014–2015
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Say what you will... but this makes me appreciate commercials that much more.

Seriously though we pay "licensing fees" as well, to those like Comcast, Cox, DirecTV etc.... if you have those services.
 
I would guess laws in UK on this are different. How ever in the US they wouldn't be allowed to do this as if they had to crack your WIFI to spy on you would be serious breach as they is warrantless on top of that this would be a Federal violation of authorization of a computer network. One of the law's on the books here is even if its Open wifi if you connect to it without permission its considered a felony, Yes sitting outside mcdonalds and using their wifi is a felony as their free wifi is based on you are a customer.
 
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