Thats ridiculous, they are going to base the jurisdiction of a licence on a powered connection?

So, technically, I can sit in the house of a non-licence fee paying friend and stream tv over HIS wifi connection on my laptop so long as the battery is fully charged, but I cant plug my laptop in his mains and stream tv with my own 3G card?

Does this mean I could avoid paying the licence fee, and stream tv to my laptop over wifi at home so long as I stop between episodes to recharge the laptop?

How do they intend to prove this? OK they detect TV has been streamed to a non-paying household. How do you prove whether the device it was streamed to was plugged in or not?

Further more, isnt this a case of horrendous double standards? If I was one of those odd folks who doesnt have a tv, and a mate, oblivious, stays over with his portable. I would get the fine, and the BBC would make it exceptionally clear the licence is tied to the property, not to me.

Consequently, If I go and stream tv in someone elses house, why am I liable for anything at all? Oh all of a sudden, the licence follows the person and not the property? Oh but wait, it doesnt follow the person either, as I am covered at home, what does it follow then Aunty Beeb, what does it follow????

Someone hasnt thought this through, and I await the resultant court cases with interest

As the smartphone seems to be seen as a personal player the owner of the smartphone would be liable not the person who owns / lives in the property. With laptops it could be reasoned this is just like a small colour tv therefore the person who owns / lives in the property is liable.

The reasoning behind it, is most likely got to do with the good old TV. If the person who own the TV has a TV license they can not just put it in another property as have it being used as a TV. Otherwise one of your mates could have a TV license and if you all sign the ownership of your TVs to him you would not need to pay the license fee yourself as they would have been covered by his license fee although the TV is actually used in your property.

They seem to have acknowledge the fact that there have "always" been mobile TV units which work of battery and which you can use while traveling etc. To ensure people couldn't abuse that little loophole they probably put the "mains" restriction in there.

For actual TV units it makes relative sense but when you look at other mobile devices which are now capable of live streaming TV this restriction all of a sudden becomes ridiculous.

In all fairness the whole TV license has become a bit outdated. If you consider the amount of paperwork involved and the costs that must be incurred administrating it all, not to mention the hassle it's on the stores actually selling the equipment. If you consider that 98% of households have a TV wouldn't it be considerably cheaper to deal with the TV license funds directly via income tax?

As it's so much easier to administer the cost could come down considerably as all the admin work is already done cutting down most of the overhead. Not to mention there would be no more reason to check if people had paid or not as it's all done via your normal taxes. And to be entirely honest the majority of the 2% of households who do not have a TV in all likelihood wouldn't be paying income tax anyways.

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by Chambler
If you consider that 98% of households have a TV wouldn't it be considerably cheaper to deal with the TV license funds directly via income tax?

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Agreed. If the BBC is a public service, everyone has to pay regardless of whether they "benefit" personally. If it isn't, it should be treated like any other subscription service. Either way, the TV license is a clunky system. It's meant to guarantee independence, but this could be done by a new law regarding a Beeb tax.

As for the policies around plugging in your laptop or mobile, I assume you can only be done if you're actually watching the BBC. Anyhow, the chances of being caught are probably remote.

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by Byron
As for the policies around plugging in your laptop or mobile, I assume you can only be done if you're actually watching the BBC. Anyhow, the chances of being caught are probably remote.

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Unless they actively start monitoring as although the chances of being caught are remote the fines can extreme (up to £1.000). Therefore if they want to generate more funds actively patrolling areas like airports which have a abundance of wifi & laptops / smartphones yet do not have TV licenses should be "well worth it" .

Especially if you take into consideration that with ISPs having to store usage information, and feed that back to the government so they can data mine all these billion of sites we visit every day, it should be easy enough to determine if any public TV is currently being streamed with the IP range of a location that doesn't have a TV license but does have a wifi hotspot.

Considering that most of these wifi hotspots are unencrypted the only thing you would need to pin-point which person is actually doing it is a laptop with a modified wifi card and some sniffing & location software to determine which device is actually streaming the data at the moment. If that device is plugged in you can start writing the ticket as no matter if that person has a TV license or no under the current law they are watching TV without a license.

Far fetched? Maybe. But wouldn't people have said the same in 2002 if you had told them local councils would start using anti-terrorism CCTV cams for litter / dog poo & parking offenses?