Sometime before sending, Derek J. Balling typed (and on Friday 2012-01-06 sent): > Pedantically: UK residents are required to pay a TV licence, > and aren't entitled to have TVs without paying said licence > fee. If you sit offshore and can still catch the TV broadcast, > you're perfectly, legally, entitled, to view it.
Indeed, and even in the UK you only need a licence for a device which can view TV programmes *at the time they are transmitted*. You don't need a licence to watch a video of a TV programme that someone else recorded (or you recorded at a licensed address). So you don't, in fact, need a TV licence to use iPlayer or get_iplayer, within the UK, except, just possibly, for live feeds. Since most people use get_iplayer because their broadband is too slow or too flaky to watch programmes in real time, that won't apply to the majority of users. David Woodhouse: > More pedantically: you're allowed to have a TV. You're just not allowed > to receive TV broadcasts with it. If you can show that it is used only > as a monitor, for example with a games console, and you don't have any > antenna hooked up to it, then that should be sufficient. > Actually convincing the man with the detector van of that fact, and > getting them to stop hassling you, is of course another matter :) Yes ! Back in the 80's when I was an impoverished software writer just starting my own business, I had a cheap TV as a monitor for my BBC micro. I didn't manage to convince the TV license people that I wasn't watching TV, and it ended up being cheapr and less trouble to buy a licence (whcih cost more than the TV, and, after a couple of years, more than the extra a proper monitor would have cost). I've maintained a grudge against the TV license people ever since those days and delight in not paying a TV licence fee for an unoccupied property we own which they are always threatening to visit. They keep sending threatening letters to "the occupier" which get sent back "not known at this address", usually taped to something rather heavy. Come as often as you like :-) I do, however, regard the TV licence people as entirely separate from the BBC, whom I held in much higher regard - until they started making TV programmes available on the net, as long as you didn't use Linux or live somewhere too rural for truly broad broadband... Andy _______________________________________________ get_iplayer mailing list get_iplayer@lists.infradead.org http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/get_iplayer