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The endlessly vexed question of TV licence fee evasion has come up in the press again after it was today reported that the BBC were considering a change to the iPlayer video streaming service. The change would essentially involve linking people’s online BBC accounts to their home addresses for the first time (i.e. to see if anybody is using the service without a licence).
At present the iPlayer service uses somewhat of a soft approach to licence fee verification, which involves a basic check-box exercise (i.e. merely asking if you’ve got a TV licence or not) and passive checks via the use of UK-registered IP addresses (geo-checking), user-provided postcodes, and account data. But it doesn’t really do much to enforce this, and hasn’t previously linked online accounts to full UK home addresses.
According to Sky News, the BBC are now working on ways to use iPlayer to find households that haven’t paid for a TV licence, such as by linking BBC online accounts to home addresses. A TV Licensing spokesperson said: “We always look at ways to improve how we collect the licence fee. This includes using the data available to us to get a better understanding of viewing habits and use of BBC services.”
The issue has never stopped being a hot topic, although it’s currently much more relevant as the government continue to debate the future of the BBC’s funding and more people turn to other streaming platforms. Not to mention the issue of how TV services will be delivered in the future.
The UK Government have already committed to the future of Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT) until 2034, which is in keeping with how some broadcasters have warned that existing DTT infrastructure is “unlikely to be commercially attractive after the mid-2030s“ (here); this is because they can’t afford to distribute their content both online and via traditional infrastructures like DTT with costs rising (i.e. the less time people spend on DTT, the less cost-effective per viewer it is).
In the future we may all end up getting our TV and video content via broadband connections, which has its pros and cons (here and here).