– How do authorities check if you’re watching TV without a licence in the UK?
In: Technology
There’s little more to it than having a database of addresses that don’t have a TV license. They can then send someone round to have a look in and see if you’re watching TV.
TV Licensing claim that they have detection equipment that can detect if your watching TV illegally. I would be genuinely astonished if that were true. They may well have equipment that can detect a tv that’s switched on, but proving the precise location of the TV, and that it’s not being used to watch a dvd, I would think is close to impossible.
They occasionally send someone to your place to check it, but you can tell them to just not come to your place, and theyre legally obliged to leave. They can send you letters warning you you need to pay, but you can send them a letter asking them to not send you letters anymore and they have to oblige. Plus, these letters, threatening as they may look, arent legally binding either. Furthermore, they have vehicles that can supposedly detect if youre watching BBC, but nobody knows how the tech works, and to this day not one person has been caught using these machines, so its dubious if they do.
Seems thus far they have been rather secretive about how and if the technology works well. One cool thing they claim to be able to do is they can use light detectors to scan a household. If the household is watching a TV station, the brightness of the lights from the window will change as the TV changes, and this can be mapped to the brightness of the current broadcast, if it matches then one can know that TV is being watched in there.
[There is also an entire Wikipedia page on this topic. Seems thousands are prosecuted for it per year, which is pretty surprising given how hard this is to catch.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom#Licence_fee_enforcement)
Years ago they used to drive vans around that would be able to detect which houses were and which houses weren’t.. but now I think they just send letters to every house that doesn’t have a TV license, and expect people to buy one.
I too would love to know this.
The myth is that they have the ability to track down the signals emited by your TV antenna when connected to an active receiver. And although this is theoretically possible nobody have been able to demonstrate such a device in practice and no evidence of such a device have ever been found.
Most of the time they find out because shops selling TVs are required to tell the authorities of any units sold. They then issue investigators who will quite literally peak through the windows to try to see the TV or look for the antenna. If they suspect you have a TV that can receive licensed programming then they will warn you and try to get you to pay your license fee. But you can still refuse and challenge their evidence at which case they might back down or they might start the court procedures.
You need a license to watch TV in the UK?
The basic answer is they assume that every residential address has a TV and send threatening letters to any address that doesn’t have a licence. If you ignore the threatening letters, they will send people round to knock on your door and try to see if you do in fact have a TV in the house. There were claims in the past of “detector vans”, and in the era of analogue CRT TVs there are certain things they could hypothetically detect, but they’ve never produced evidence in court from that, and it is likely the whole thing was just a made up ruse to make people think they’ll get caught, so encourage them to pay up.
They don’t: they just send threatening letters with the implication that they “know” to every single unregistered postcode and rely on the fear of “dang they got me! I have to pay now”. Apparently this is very effective, a lot more than spying 60.000.000 million 24/7 to see if they watch illegally live shows.
This guy collects them and posts them [online](http://www.bbctvlicence.com/) for the past 15 years. He also does an interesting investigation about it, worth the links there.
The myth of the van doesn’t make any sense as today you could be watching youtube live tv from your tiny smart coffee maker..
They used to be able to detect the [colorburst crystal frequencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorburst) if you had an old TV. Black & white TV’s had their own particular frequencies, also.
Not sure how they’d do it with today’s TV’s and/or computers, but it’s probably something similar.
Rule 2.
Better to r/askabrit or r/askuk.
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