Comment The license fee thing... (Score 5, Interesting) 82
Being a license fee payer, this years olympic coverage from the BBC was actually good enough for me to consider the license fee to be 100% justified. The lack of ads alone was awesome.
The debate about the license fee tends to rage back and forth on a regular basis over here. We genuinely do get a metric ton of generally good quality tv, ad-free and with free streaming. And a lot of tat too. Although it's interesting to note that the UK really came late to the Pay-per-view party. Convincing people that paid a license fee/monthly fee for their cable or sat package that they have to pay again? The main selling points they used over here were the "when you want" nature of the beast, for movies and such, and for sporting events, likening it to buying a ticket. They worked very hard not to remind people that you'd already paid them for the priviledge.
Guess I'll always sneakily love the BBC as being one of the last holdouts against the paywalling of culture, or the slow posioning of it by 1000 ads for things I never knew I could be irritated by.