It's not that hard to find viewing/listening numbers and site visitors.

You can frame it in a lot of ways, to balloon the number. Daily, weekly and monthly users would be interesting numbers to have.

The above numbers might indicate 94% interacts with BBC at least once a year, we can't know. As the quote isn't specifying how they determined it

TV detection vans are real but they aren't high tech. Some people think they have fancy antennas that can detect your TV. Other people think it's all a bluff and the antennas on the roof of the van are fake just for show.

The truth is much simpler. The antennas on the top of the van are real, but they just receive regular TV broadcasts. The technician watches TV in the back of the van. They also point a parabolic microphone at your window so they can hear what's happening inside the house.

If there's a TV playing in the house, the technician flips through TV channels to see if they can synch up the mic audio with the broadcast audio. If they record a perfect match, that's sufficient to prove that you're watching broadcast TV, not just a recording, VHS, DVD, or streaming service.

Edit: I should clarify, the reason this isn't considered eavesdropping or wiretapping is because the technician isn't actually listening to or recording the audio being gathered from the shotgun mic. They are just observing the results of a comparator that is comparing the TV broadcast waveform with the mic waveform, without recording anything. This allows them to identify identical sound profiles without actually hearing or recording the sound. The machine basically goes "Yep these audio signals match to within an acceptable margin of error"

I don’t know anyone with AC. I don’t know anyone without a TV.

Do consider, a TV starts at around a few hundred quid. AC, for a single unit installed, is £3.5k.

I know AC is not a thing hence the need to pay to put it in. I know central Air is out due to no ducts but my uncle had AC installed in his conservatory last year and it was not cheap.

My friends bought a portable AC unit because they have a new born baby and didn't want to be fretting when it was 38 degrees. Not everyone can shell out £400 though...

Keeping heat in is no different then keeping it out. Insulation is insulation.

Netflix tax

I quite like this idea

The problem here is that they are used to the model where they sell a license to say Sherlock for US audiences and it's Netflix that buys that for a huge pile of cash. Could they probably make a lot more by cutting out the middle man? Sure, but then they'd have to support all those users directly.

I tried using a VPN for iPlayer, and I was able to watch one episode of a show before it caught on and blocked me.

I had to create an account, including a fake address located in the UK. And even then, it didn't work.

I'm curious how you're doing it if you're not having issues. Do you have to sign in?

I meant to give a few of the alternative funding arrangements if the license fee were scrapped but I managed not to say that part out loud, oops

Broadcast TV may be a dying format. But, BBC is a lot more than broadcast TV. They do radio, they do podcasts, they do short form video content, they do streaming, they do VOD, they do web news and blogs.

IMO, that's the problem with a TV subscription. A lot of people interact with BBC stuff on a daily basis on phones, computers, game consoles, etc. It's hard to avoid seeing a piece of BBC content even if you don't own a TV.

They already sell it to the yanks as Britbox and are reasonably successful at it but the license fee currently covers about four billion quid of their six billion annual operating costs. They don't have to do Netflix numbers but it's a lot of subs to sell (assuming that it must remain free to UK viewers and of ads)