Most people do both in the US, don't they? Paying for cable and still getting ads.

When they brought in one of the early cable TV systems in Australia, I think a selling point was that they had very few commercials. That didn't last long, and these days it feels like they have more than free-to-air... So I don't bother - free-to-air and the internet is enough.

Per [1] the fee appears to be £145.50 a year, or roughly $229.10 USD according to Wolfram Alpha.

[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/licen...

In Germany it’s €215.76 per year, so about $266. Similar, but I can’t help and feel that value for money is worse here. There is some real cool stuff the BBC does that just does not exist in Germany.

But it seems that the Olympics will get pretty great coverage, also on the web. (There were, e.g., streams with and without commentary available tonight.)

£145.50 (US$228) per year. About £0.40 (US$0.65) per day.

Excellent value in my opinion.

And if you don't pay, you'll get regular visits from TV licensing agents:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Uni...

Which you can completely ignore, because the agents are just standard salesmen really - they have no special rights. It also costs you money to report that you don't have a TV, so the simplest way is just throw the notices straight into the bin.

(Unless you do have a TV of course)

* If you don't pay and watch live TV.

You can choose not to have a TV and not pay the license. Without the license you can still watch BBC iPlayer (although not the live bit).

Believe me, you still get visits and threatening letters from the TV licencing people.

You just need to fill in the form at https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/no-licence-needed/ every three years. I've done that before and it's stopped the letters.

It didn't work for me, they still sent threatening letters every few weeks that all but accused me of lying.

I love the BBC (even though I didn't always own a TV) but in my experience the TV licencing company are bullying scum.

That's a whole lot less than paying for cable to get ESPN

Most of the sports channels aren't covered by the licence fee, you still have to pay for cable (or Satellite) for them. The Olympics are one of the few exceptions.

I don't find it so great; it's more than double what I pay for Netflix or Lovefilm, and I seem to be getting more use out of them overall. There's some good stuff on BBC but not that many shows I'm that excited about.

Also, iplayer is not great. The whole business of having to watch shows within a week is, frankly, pretty lame.

While you may think the license is good value. If we have a TV in the UK and watch it we have to pay the license. The fee is for the BBC channels alone. I can't choose to watch commercial TV only and not pay the fee. Simple solution is to scramble the BBC. But they're too used to getting their grubby little paws on money by some kind of state extortion. I'll take a guess and say that I watch a max of about 2 hours of BBC TV a week if that. That's hardly fair.

I'd rather the choice to opt out of the BBC and still watch TV.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/whoweare/licen...

Perhaps it will be worth the fee if I have children (kids TV.) I love BBC radio 4 though. The radio should work out as far better value for money, but quite how they calculate it to be an 1/8th of the TV costs is a bit of a puzzle! They must be throwing money at presenters or something.

Here's a good breakdown of the license fee:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jul/12/bbc-spen...

Why aren't there more startups -- or established channels -- offering a cable channel at 2x-3x the price, with no commercials?

A lot of people probably can't afford it, but for those who can, it seems like it'd be an interesting option to have.

Well the main reason for startups not doing this is that broadcasting (at least of new content) is a land of exclusive deals over varying size territories. In order to offer content you would essentially have two options:

1) Bid national scale against the big players for enough content to fill your channel which wouldn't be within reach of anything I would normally picture as a start up.

OR

2) Make arrangements with each of the current local exclusive rights holders and have Geographic holes where you couldn't make the deals (which might mean different content is blacked out in each area).

The best chance might be if you could start in one large broadcast market where you could find an amenable local broadcast partner AND cable company. I wouldn't expect it to be easy or profitable though.

Could established players do it? Maybe although it might depend on the exact structure of their current deals.

DVRs have already sewn up most of that demand, with fewer licensing/channel conflict issues.

Does PBS have adverts?