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tv license rant /the bastards
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Damanda
20 posts

Re: tv license rant /the bastards
Mar 06, 2003, 22:18
How much is your license fee and how often do you have to pay it? In addition to your license fee, do you still have to pay your cable/ sattelite monthly charges?

We don't have to pay for a tv license in the US, but you have to sit through probably 26 minutes of commercials for every hour of programming on the networks. then at night, the cable and satellite programs sell your channels out to infomercials which cancel out programming at that time of the night and you don['t get to see what's being broadcast to other parts of the country which didn't sell out their time slots. This is done to offset the cost of keeping a channel on the air so that it doesn't fall under the pay channel umbrella. Less popular channels such as home and garden tv, the travel channel, the food network, bbc america, fine living and the history channel usually go to "paid programming" after midnight.

The channels that are commercial free are paid channels like HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, Starz, etc etc etc and other channels that you pay for....like the Biography channel, VH1 Classic, etc etc. The other channels that are commercial free are the PBS channels. (Public Broadcasting) and you get one per major metropolitan area. They do quarterly pledge drives, but the programming is pretty boring and dismal. During the pledge drives they do have a lot of interesting programs though. One of the most succesful pledge drives was for a station in Seattle which aired that Neil Gaiman UK series "Neverwhere" during pledge week. My brother worked for a PBS station at the time and was able to get me copies of the shows. (yay!)

Your tv license fees sound awful and the fact that they actually arrest people for the violations is probably what is worse. If they actually need the funds to operate the stations, maybe they should just tack them on to the cable and sattelite fees or just impose a tax on every new television sold. If the dismal alternative to charging these fees is having to be bombarded with shitty adverts throughout your shortened program times...well, I don't know which one is worse.

I watch pay tv almost exclusively because the commercials kill me.
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Re: tv license rant /the bastards (FourWinds)
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