They have spy trucks that drive up and down the road looking for spurious RF from TVs.
Personally I always attempt to keep my RF emissions non-spurious, but that's just me.
(They aren't looking for spurious emissions but I'll leave it alone.)
PBS is my favorite. I would donate more if doing so would block their pledge drives.
DVR. Works for either type of commercials, the standard sort or the ten minutes of sponsors at the beginning and end of each PBS show and their incessant pledge drives.
The things are wonderful as a disruptive tech against advertising in general, and the content providers wasting everyone's time overall.
I'm assuming neither of you consider the US a first world country either, then!
21st in personal freedoms. We really aren't as impressive nor as free as the rah-rah 'Murica crowd would like to believe. Risk taking is actively shunned, conformity is taught and valued over individuality, and everyone gets a nice shiny participation trophy or ten. Get in your minivan and go to work, peasant. You owe 50% of your earnings to the collective. Don't ask why that much money still seems to always leave the politicians begging for more. They spent what you're paying in today, it decades ago.
Sadly true. Most millennials think the idea of all working towards a common goal of sharing the wealth and goods while letting the government "take care of us" and control our lives is a great idea, yet have no clue what communism is.
Of course the donkey party tells them vote for us and you won't need to worry about wealth, health care or working anymore. Want to see how great government control works out for the people, just visit an indian reservation.
Actually Harvard did a really interesting study. They asked Millenials about what they thought of things like "Socialism" and "Communism" and they generally rated those words as very highly praised.
Then Harvard asked those same Millenials what things they liked -- without giving away that they were asking about socialized vs capitalistic goods and services -- so they asked very specifically about things in their daily lives.
Almost all of those things Millenials liked and wanted more of, were actually ridiculously capitalist and capitalist created.
The study didn't go so far as to say it, but it basically pointed out a huge disconnect between what Millenials were taught those ideologies mean and stand for, and what they actually mean and stand for -- and were hinted at that capitalism was "bad", but when pressed for what they actually want and want to do, they still really want all the benefits of capitalism as their main desires in life.
In other words: Change the meaning of the words and use them as a marketing slogan for a particular political cult (and their massive chrony capitalism, which is no different than the other major political cult) and the kids don't even notice -- because they don't even know what the words actually mean anymore.
This is how you end up with someone holding a press conference about perceived government "oppression" wearing a Fidel Castro t-shirt or Che t-shirt. If you don't teach about what those people actually did to others, it's pretty easy to see them as something strangely good and t-shirt worthy. If you could magically let either one of them loose on the average millenial's family to make them disappear or flat out murder them, the Millenials would probably "get it" pretty quick.
Oh well, history repeats.
It's kinda like the fake differences between PBS and regular networks. They're really the same. Both have commercials. Both get massive amounts of OTA spectrum handed to them by crony politics, not by any particularly compelling reasoning for who controls the spectrum or has access to it, but also get to shut out new competition via political favors built into the licensing system.
Both have content that their particular brand of humans like to watch, formatted slightly differently, neither of which are particularly any better or worse than the other production companies.
One has billionaire owners who can fund new ideas or projects, the other has billions from trust funds and foundations.
The list of similarities goes on and on and on. About the only difference is those silly donation drives, which make people who are simply too lazy to click on a website and set up a credit card autopay, feel better about themselves when they believe the whole thing would come crashing down without their $20/year. LOL.
Anyway. Back to BBC. That's an even bigger hot mess than American TV, but it's been that way for so long British people barely give the stupidity of it all, a second thought. If you boil the frog slowly... TV fee to watch an OTA broadcast, indeed. How stupid.
And there's the overall general concept of State run TV... I can't think of any place where that worked out well in the long run.
Mmmmm. Pravda. Tasty approved news. Yummy.
Control of media is one of the tenets of any good statist minded plan, that's held solid for centuries.
We're well into the disinformation age, that's for sure. Take some footage that shows something completely different, do a little creative cutting and editing, add a compelling voice over, and people will believe anything.
They'll even believe two TV networks are materially different, while not noticing they get the same spectrum deals and the transmitters both came from and lined the pockets of someone at Harris... or the cameras all come from one of three plants on the planet making the sensors... or...
