No, as previously stated it's most defiantly not free, the current cost for one house hold is £142.50. And they have a great way of collecting that, it's called the law. They assume that every house in the UK has a TV of some form and if you don't register a TV licence they will start sending you letters and eventually the threat is followed through with a man knocking on your door. They used "TV Detector Vans" at one point but I think it was largely accepted that was just a scare tactic, now they use the power of the government database. As stupid as it sounds they have a very low tolerance for people not paying and people do go to jail if they refuse to pay and the fines can be quite substantial too.

Cheers

Cris.

The same applies for TV tuner cards -- I bought a Hauppage card from somewhere on Tottenham Court Road, and they took down my address details and forwarded them to the agency.

No you don't.

Link

Nor do you need one to watch iPlayer programming after the show was originally broadcast (see link at the bottom of that page).

So if you wanted to watch Top Gear or Dr. Who in the same way that Tony does so (i.e. after it has been broadcast, even if only by an hour or two) you could do so legally for 'free' (i.e. without needing a TV license)

I meant the iPlayer stuff. I guess you could look at that as being part of the TV license, but if you actually had no TV in your house and legitimately didn't pay the TV license, you could still get to iPlayer for free.

Good point, but I think they are looking to change that in some way. Some kind of broadband tax that would cover things like iPlayer.

You do still have to pay the licence if you own a TV but don't even have it tuned in and just watch DVDs, the fact the equipment is capable of picking up a live broadcast is enough.

I'm not complaining about the licence system, I think it's a good thing. And that is proved by people living in a country where some of the most popular programs ever made come from still want to watch BBC content. My point was that even though some people's perception that we get it for free so they should be able to get it for free doesn't make it any more or less of a crime when you illegally download it on a torrent.

Cheers

Cris.

That TV Licensing FAQ snoopstah linked, which appears to be official, specifically says that you're wrong:

Films give me qualms too: if the entire music industry were wound up tomorrow, which is effectively what would happen if copyright were made inapplicable to digital data, then there would still be music (indeed, music would arguably be better off) -- but if the entire film industry were wound up, then there wouldn't still be films.

Peter

In theory, yes. But I think that in practice the onus is often on you to prove that you never use the built-in tuner. Which is, philosophically speaking, a difficult thing to prove. Though people have. This issue used to be a fertile source of pedantry flamewars on that fertile ground for pedantry flamewars, the Cambridge newsgroup cam.misc.

Peter

s/download/upload/

The main exemption is that you can use as many TV receviers as you like, as long as they aren't used for receiving broadcast TV (specifically currently broadcasting TV).

So you can install a TV (but don't tune it!), hook it up a PC and watch timeshifted shows on iPlayer, but not the live feeds. edit: Ok, this was posted earlier.

The onus is on them to prove you are using it to watch broadcast TV. If you have a tuned TV on the premises and they somehow got a search warrant (they need evidence of use for this), then it could be tricky, but if the TV was untuned they wouldn't get a conviction without other evidence.

Hmmm interesting, this has changed my understanding. It certainly never used to be as clear cut as that.

Still doesn't make downloading content illegally ok, even here in the UK the licence issued to you on iPlayer only lasts 30 days a torrent divx file for example is outside any legal licence so is just as bad as any other pirate goods.

Cheers

Cris.

I remember somebody going to great efforts to actually remove the tuner in his TV because he only ever watched foreign satellite TV so didn't want or need to watch regular broadcasts. I think in the end he won but it involved an incredible amount of hassle and effort...

I guess they've changed their policy since then.

And if you had bought it online from an overseas retailer...?

Yes, there would be. Unless you meant "there wouldn't be $120-million dollar, craptacularly story-less, blockbuster VFX circle-jerks." Much like there is an indie music scene, there is also very much an indy film scene.

Yes, but most of it is crap made by just the same kind of self-indulgent tw*ts who just haven't got their big break yet.

Right, I'd not mourn those. (And one thing about VFX-fest films is that if they're worth seeing at all, they're worth seeing in a real cinema with big screen and sound system. So there is a revenue stream available there.) But according to IMDB, even "Brokeback Mountain", most of which was two dudes sitting round a campfire not even saying all that much, cost $44 million to make. Clearly some of that went on overpricing by suppliers (and actors?) who knew their customers were loaded -- overpricing, in other words, which would soon vanish if film-makers lost their cosy monopoly on digital copying of their work. But it still seems that making films which don't suck is still really quite expensive compared to making music which doesn't suck.

I'm very glad that "The Fellowship of the Ring" ($93M) and "Lawrence of Arabia" ($15M in 1962 dollars) were made, and were made the way they were.

Peter

I don't see how it's any different to Football (eugh!) where blokes who would most likely be binmen, carpet fitters or insurance salesmen in another life can be paid £100k a week to chase after a ball. These industries are all self perpetuating with salaries that increase year on year like Moore's law.

With regards to technology and equipment, costs really can get out of hand very quickly. Film stock alone can be ludicrously expensive, add to that the hire cost of decent cameras, lighting and grip equipment.

Also, the film and TV industry in the US is massively unionised which means they really do pay people large sums of money to just sit on their asses all day doing nothing.

So, Unions are indirectly responsible for film piracy. They should cover that in one of their next public service announcements.

Er, no. I'm simply saying that the unionised labour in that industry has resulted in the increase of salaries and numbers of people involved which, in turn, results in the increase in overall cost of a production.

I'm all for unions when they help support members being treated unfairly by their employers, but when they start engaging in Spanish practices, that's when I have a problem.

Well, that's one difference from football, then: at least more money does buy you more gear (and even "Brokeback Mountain" probably had vapour-trails and so on removed in post-production) and thus, in theory, a better end-product -- though diminishing returns can of course set in. Whereas with football, as long as you're paying Eric Cantona or Jimmy Greenhoff or whoever the current superstars are, enough that they can give up their day-job and be full-time footballers, presumably extra money on top of that doesn't really cause them to produce better-quality football. (And how come, given that TV plays such a massive part in popularising the sport and lionising its stars, it's the TV people paying the clubs in order to televise their matches, and not the other way round?)

Peter

The problem is that most unions are crooked and all unions abuse their bargaining power. At least in North America.

Anyway, it doesn't seem like cinema piracy has put a dent in movie profits at all.

My personal experience of unions in the US (particularly in New York) is exactly that. The companies I dealt with did the majority of their work in New Jersey and left installation in Manhattan until the absolute last moment.

I don't know how it works over there, but over here, sports programing generates tons of ad revenue for the TV people, so it's well worth it for them to pay the leagues for the rights to televise the games.

Update:

Comcast says their limit is 250 gigabytes per month, bidirectional, as we had already discussed.

What surprises me is that there's no way for a customer to monitor their household bandwidth usage. (I asked.) Clearly Comcast can track a given client's bandwidth usage (they have to in order to enforce the cap), but keep that information secret from the users until they bust the threshold. How terribly unfair.

I suppose could put a dedicated proxy computer between my network and the cable modem, and track usage that way. But I don't have the extra computer and don't want to do that anyway.

I like being able to stream instant Netflix on my Xbox or my Tivo. I wonder how many of those I could watch in a month before hitting 250gb.

Here are some interesting numbers:

Assuming a 10Mbps link, you could theoretically download just over 3TB per month at full speed, 24 hours a day. That means that Comcast is limiting you to one-twelfth of what you assumed you could get.

You've gotta figure a Netflix download is probably about 2GB. A DVD would be about 4GB, the quality is somewhat lower, and the compression is probably a little better. (I would guess H.264 vs. a DVD's MPEG-2.) So give it some overhead and call it 100 movies. That's still more than three a day, so it's probably not a significant barrier, unless you have a digital hoarding complex.

Still, it sucks for them to change the rules on you.

Yup, about 2-3gb per Netflix movie is confirmed from some searches I did.

So for my purposes (mostly video games and netflix streaming), 250gb per month is generous enough. As long as I don't host torrents, I should be OK.

And they didn't really change the rules on *me*, they started doing it before I signed up, so I went in knowing what the situation was. What I don't like is the inability to monitor the overall household usage unless I install a routing server in front of the cable modem.

How much would a HD netflix rental set you back? What exactly happens when you hit the cap after the warning? They shut you down and you just get one last final bill?

What if I were to exceed "the cap" by using their "On Demand" system to watch HD (free movies and other free content) rentals over and over via the cable box they provide?

The cable modem doesn't have a small admin/configuration web portal that tells you this?