TV Licence article Discussion

parttimebrit

New question about TV Licence..... I am now retired and spend over 9months of the year out of the UK. No-one else lives in my apartment. Is it possible for me to only pay a pro-rate fee for the times that I am in England?

cw18

Not up front. You'd have to purchase a licence for the full year and then claim for a refund of the unused quarters. But they only refund for FULL quarters, and every licence starts on the 1st of a month, so it's highly likely you'll only get 6 months refunded

eg. you return to UK on 10th and buy a new licence which starts from previous 1st. You then leave UK on 9th 3 months on, but that's part way through the 4th month on your licence - so they won't refund for your 2nd quarter as you've used 9 days of it

I assume you're not 75 or older? If you (or anyone else who lives in your apartment is) then you're entitled to a free licence anyway.

parttimebrit

Hi CW 18, Thanks for the information much appreciated.:-)

zaax

parttimebrit wrote: »

New question about TV Licence..... I am now retired and spend over 9months of the year out of the UK. No-one else lives in my apartment. Is it possible for me to only pay a pro-rate fee for the times that I am in England?

Don't watch live TV and don't pay at all.

keithitalic

I've noticed that when there is the possibility of watching "live" tennis on the bbc iplayer site you can now watch it 2 or any number of minutes that you wish later than the live broadcast. If I were to watch it 2 minutes late for example do I need a tv licence? Or is there a magic number of minutes delay, greater than which I do not need a licence?!

Cornucopia

There is no figure defined in Law. When asked, though, TVL cite 2 hours as their view.

mttylad

2 minutes later is not live.

Its delayed by 120 seconds.

Nilrem

Although the delay could be down to things like the encoder used for live streaming, as most encoders work best with a little headroom/time, and one of the best ways to do that is I think to give it x seconds worth of content to work with before it sends the final output (I know for example for the best results with consumer programmes you tend to want to let an encoder do two or more passes through the whole file).

Or even the time for the encoding to the live stream, then the effective mirroring (including any buffering at the mirror hosts and on the end user), as from memory the BBC have a bunch of different servers to play out the iplayer content.

IIRC the term live for the TVL is taken to allow for such things as natural delays in the broadcast, otherwise digital TV wouldn't be live, as depending on the service you are watching (IE satellite, DTV or cable) will all have differing delays in when you receive the signal, and different decoders used in the receivers can result in different delays even from the same source (let alone the very noticeable delay that was there if you had an analogue TV and a digital set receiving from the same aerial in the same room).

spice246

I run a small pub and have been told by TVL that I need a licence for the pub AND my accommodation upstairs. Is this correct?

Thanks.....

Cornucopia

Probably. It depends on the exact set-up of the two TV receivers and the accommodation.

As a general rule, if there is a lockable front door on the accommodation, it is considered a separate address. All the more so if it has a separate street address on the Post Office database (you can check this yourself at their website).

You only need a licence to watch and record TV broadcasts, though, so you may have an option with catch-up TV. Alternatively, you could use a battery-powered device in the flat, such as a laptop, covered by the main licence.

Also, there might be some options with receiving TV in one of the premises and streaming recordings locally to the other.