More TV license news to enrage the nation this week following RTE director general Dee Forbes words last Wednesday that she thought the TV license fee should be double. While that's not going to happen any time soon and Forbes later said it would not be 'practical', a number of households without any TV will be expected to pay soon if Communications Minister Denis Naughten has anything to do with it.
He is looking to change the definition of the 'television set' under our laws, according to the Irish Independent, and remove the exemption that "non-portable television sets capable of exhibiting television broadcasting services distributed by means of the publicly available internet" should not have to pay the TV license.
Recent figures have shown that almost one in ten households don't have a TV set but are accessing content over the internet. This amounts to about 32,500 homes and if they all had to pay the license fee it would work out to be €5m for RTÉ, the license fee's main benefactor.
It's looking like the €160 annual payment will be applied to any devices over 11 inches, which would exclude mobile phones and standard tablets but would mean anyone with desktop computers, laptops and large iPads would have to pay.
The change would make the law similar to that in the UK, where anyone who uses the BBC Player must pay the license fee, although proving that must be difficult and no doubt many would say in Ireland that they don't use the RTE player. There is no word yet on how they would police it here, and there is already over €40m of license fees not collected every year, however, the minister has also said he is considering outsourcing the collection of unpaid TV licence fees to a private company, so it may become an awful lot more difficult to avoid paying it pretty soon.