![]() Your friend’s house needs a licence as well. In other words, if you take your laptop to a friend’s house and plug it into the mains to watch live television, then it’s not covered by the TV licence from your house. However, if you plug your device into a mains socket outside your home, that site needs its own TV licence. Your home TV licence covers your mobile use outside the home, as long as you watch TV on battery power. The solution to this conundrum is battery power. Things got a little more complicated once you could watch live TV on a mobile device, which meant you could watch it outside your licensed home. You didn’t need another licence for a second or third TV set in a kitchen or bedroom. Once you had a TV licence registered to your home address, it covered numerous people watching live TV on numerous TV sets. The concept of the TV licence was based on households, and has been extended to shops, offices and other business premises. This exception was only introduced in September 2016, and not everyone knows about it. In this case, you’re paying the BBC because you are consuming BBC content. However, you do need a TV licence to use the BBC’s advert-free iPlayer catch-up service. These services are, after all, paid for by advertising. You can watch anything stored on services such as ITV Hub, All 4 and My5, as long as you don’t watch live TV. You don’t need a TV licence to watch programmes on catch-up TV services, with the exception of the BBC’s iPlayer. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The GuardianĬonversely, with one exception, you don’t need a TV licence if you only watch stored programmes, which are played “on demand” rather than streamed or broadcast live.įor example, you don’t need a TV licence to watch movies and TV programmes on DVD or Blu-ray, or streamed from Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Now TV, YouTube and similar services … unless they stream live TV. On-demand content is exempt, but you’d have to delete the BBC iPlayer app at the very least from a Fire TV box. I hope this alerts anyone who thought they were within the law because they watched TV programmes on their smartphones or via a Roku stick in the back of a monitor. You’re still watching live TV if you view the feed on a TV set, a computer monitor, on a smartphone, tablet or laptop, on a VR headset or projected on to a wall. Logically, it must also include any live television feeds on Facebook or Twitter. This includes watching live fights on Sky Sports Box Office, NHL ice hockey games from Canada, ATP tennis on Amazon Prime and so on, even though you will be paying separately to watch them. You’re still watching live TV if you get the feed from an aerial, a cable network, a satellite dish, a wifi hotspot or any other internet server. ![]() If you start streaming it just after it has ended, you don’t need a licence.Īs mentioned above, it doesn’t matter what kind of device you use to watch live television, or how you collect and process the signal. You can’t get out of paying for a licence by recording programmes and watching them later.īriefly, if you start streaming a TV programme just before it ends, you need a licence. Indeed, recording, capturing and storing live TV also counts as watching live television. ![]() The definition of “live” is flexible because there can be delays in transmission, and many set-top boxes and PVRs let you pause or save TV programmes. You still have to buy a licence if you only watch live streams from Mongolia’s Eagle TV channel. It doesn’t matter which television stations you watch, or how you watch them. The basic rule is that you must have a TV licence if you watch, record or otherwise consume live television. If you use the BBC iPlayer app on any device for any reason, you need a TV licence. ![]()
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