"I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to pay it any more"

As many as 200,000 Finnish households are watching television illegally, without paying a TV-licence fee.

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By Heikki Hellman
      In more than 200,000 Finnish households, there are people watching television on an unregistered set. There are TV-fee refugees for economic reasons, and then there are those who are making their own personal protest.
      And then again there are the secret viewers who couldn’t care less about things like licences. Though of course they aren’t called “licences” now, but “TV-fees".
     
Kari has done everything right. The 37-year-old graduate engineer has a nice house in a growing community on the west side of Uusimaa.
      He’s got a good job with a decent income, a wife, and two kids. There’s a car in the drive and the household is full of electronic gadgetry.
      But Kari is making a stand. He is no longer willing to pay his TV-fee.
     
He signed off on his TV-receiver notification at the beginning of March, and for the past three weeks, he has been watching the box illegally, without a valid receipt that he’s paid his dues.
      The forced digitalisation of the cable network was a bridge too far for him.
      “The only people who are benefiting are the cable operators, the electronics retailers, and the TV-channels”, says Kari. And what a waste it all is: electricity is getting burned up, and perfectly good equipment gets trashed or traded in for no sane reason.
     
Refusal to pay his TV-licence fee is not Kari’s only means of protest.
      He has also written dozens of posts about the digitalisation decisions on the discussion forums of online papers and has fomented a spirit of rebellion among others.
      In order to avoid problems with the licence inspectors, should they turn up, the living-room only has a television, a DVD-player, and a video recorder - and no digital decoder box.
      That item is hidden away in the study, and records programmes from there onto DVDs.
      It is a rather complicated procedure.
      “I’ve cut down on my viewing, and now we think a bit about what we watch”, Kari admits. “I could probably give up the TV altogether. It would leave more time for reading. And it might perk up the marital relations, too.”
     
Last year, a net figure of 32,000 Finns cancelled their TV-fees over digitalisation, and this year there have been 13,000 fewer fee-payers up to the end of February.
      The protest against “forced digitalisation” has grown into a modest national movement.
     
Many have given up their television sets altogether.
      The Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA) are doubtless eager to know just how many of them have, since the remainder are carrying on viewing without the luxury of paying a fee for it.
      A total of 45,000 signers-off means close to EUR 10 million in lost licence-fee revenue.
      The money comes out of the coffers of the Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE, which receives the proceeds of TV-fee payments.
     
Twelve months ago, it was estimated that there were around 200,000 homes watching television without a licence.
      Now nobody knows what the present figure might be, except that it is higher than it was before.
      Behind something like one door in ten, there is someone skulking by the set and listening out for the knock from the licence inspectors.
     
Who are these TV-licence refugees? What do we know about them?
      Practically nothing at all.
      “Sometime back in the 1990s, there was a study carried out on licence-fee dodgers. They were mainly young men, lived alone, and were residents of the bigger cities”, says Anssi Laakso, responsible for TV-fee payments at FICORA.
      One number is certain: there are about 70,000 hopeless cases.
      It has not been possible to collect their back-dated non-payments owing to their not having any money to pay them with. And not even the bailiffs can squeeze the money out.
      Some of them continue to watch illegally. They are one group of TV-fee refugees.
     
Three or four weeks back, I started a thread on the Helsingin Sanomat online discussion forums in which I asked readers to explain why they do not pay their TV-fee.
      I only received about a hundred replies to the posting, but they indicated that "young urban males" have been joined by a new set.
      At least six distinct or semi-distinct types of TV-fee refugee emerged.
      One group is made up of students, for whom the fee of EUR 215.45 each year just seems too expensive.
      “It appears as though among the young adults there is a greater shame felt about paying the fee than about getting caught not paying it”, says Anssi Laakso.
     
In the view of some, the licence-fee is simply an unfair exercise in taxation, since it is the same regardless of the payer’s financial circumstances.
      One respondent argued that it was a matter of principle, and felt that the TV transmissions of the public broadcaster YLE ought to be a part of the basic services paid for through the collection of taxes.
     
A third grouping are the “libertarians”, who believe the TV-fee is a violation of freedom of speech tenets, arguing that one aspect of this freedom is the liberty to receive whatever kinds of messages without anybody interfering to prevent it.
      The change of nomenclature from “licence” to “fee” was, claims Jaska, one of the Libertarian faction, “just a move to make it look less like it was an unconstitutional tariff, but the thing itself hasn’t changed one bit.”
      The attitude of one group was basically:´'Couldn’t care less!'
      “I haven’t paid a TV-licence for eighteeen years, and I don’t intend to start now.”
     
Then there were those who directed their protest and vitriol squarely at the Finnish Broadcasting Company.
      Some grumbled at the price of Swedish-language services, others snarled about the company’s alleged Social Democrat leanings.
      One described the broadcaster as providing a cushy and protected workplace for “Finland’s most useless actors and actresses”, while others fumed at dumbing-down and the spread of entertainment programming.
      Some do not want to see the money go to YLE, because they claim they never watch its programming anyway.
     
A sixth category of refugees comprises the "digi-protestors". Cancelling their TV-fee notification is their way of demonstrating.
      And it is the digi-rebels who have best got their voice heard. Like Kari above, they have been busy on the message boards, taking comfort and support from experts like Petteri Järvinen, who have - quite rightly - pointed out that there were no pressing technological reasons for switching off the analog signals on the cable networks.
      Those who wish to see the additional channels like YLE Teema or want to choose the language of their subtitling can buy themselves a digital decoder, but please leave the rest of us alone, or so the argument goes.
     
Many who were irked enough decided to cash in their licence-fee because the television set in the living-room gave up the ghost owing to a poor digital signal.
      A sizeable majority of the Finnish population have also had problems with their digital hardware: sometimes the picture just disintegrated into pixels, sometimes the characters mouths moved but no sound came out, and sometimes the Finnish subtitles were conspicuous by their absence.
      These technical teething-troubles are largely in the past now, but the black halo of failure has hung on: "I’m not paying up, not when they forced us into taking something that was only half-finished!"
     
The number of TV-fee notifications is now declining for the fifth year in succession. At the end of last year, the total number had slumped back to the level of 1997: 1,947,000 of them.
      FICORA is nevertheless still hopreful the tide can turn. “According to our customer service desk, we are getting a lot of returnees”, says Anssi Laakso. He believes the numbers of notifications will start to climb again this year.
      It has not happened yet. In February, nearly 27,000 households having a licence cancelled it. This was nearly as great a flight as in August 2007, when the previous record was set.
     
Helsinki student Sanna is not one of those who has cashed in her chips.
      She has never filled in a TV notification in the first place.
      She moved to the capital area in the fall of 2005 and lives with her common-law partner in a student dorm, where to the best of her knowledge nobody has paid their TV-licence fee.
      “Oh, wait. I do know one. He got caught and had to pay up. The neighboutrs laughed at him and asked him why on earth he had opened the door”, says 23-year-old Sanna.
      Once the licence inspector appeared behind her door. On that occasion she had to lie and say that there was no TV in the apartment.
     
“This isn’t any sort of Holy War against the TV-fee. It just hasn’t really felt necessary to pay it. We don’t watch the box much anyway, and not YLE”, says Sanna by way of justifying her inactions.
      She calls the attitude one of not really caring.
      “In principle, yes, this is pretty stupid. I know that somebody else is going to pay for this. But couldn’t the fee be a bit less expensive?”
      If Sanna were to establish a family and move back to the countryside, she would almost certainly pay her licence-fee, too.
      “You can’t go telling the children things like not to open the door when the doorbelll rings, because it might be the TV-inspector.”
     
But there are secret TV-watchers who do not fit into any clearly-recognisable category.
      One of them is Jussi, a 38-year-old media professional from Helsinki.
      “I stopped paying last autumn, when I noticed that I don’t watch anything on TV these days except for live sports, and about 90% of that comes on channels that I pay separately to receive”, he says.
      If he watches series or movies, they usually come from DVD.
      Jussi has two TV-receivers at home, only one of which has a digibox. The other set is used for playing PlayStation games.
     
Like Kari, Jussi is a man of principle. He does not wish to pay for the privilege of watching television as such, but only for what he watches.
      For this reason he has not bought one of the big multi-channel pay-TV packages, because he says he would only be interested in a couple of the channels at best.
      And for the same reason he has a card for MTV3's pay-channel Max.
      Jussi likes motor racing. His decisions have been greatly coloured by Max’s having the rights to show Formula One live.
     
He has nothing personal against YLE, just against the means of payment.
      “YLE have great programmme acquisition people, and good productions of their own. But if we should all be paying for this, then why aren’t we all paying?”
      Jussi believes YLE’s basic services ought to be funded from tax revenue, but that certain things could be done on a pay-per-view basis.
      "YLE Teema, for instance, is such a good channel that I would be prepared to pay a few euros a month just for that.”
     
Licence-fees were thought up in the 1920s.
      Since 1998, the licence has been known as the television fee, though old habits and usage die hard.
      Now the fee and its future, and by inference the future financing of the Finnish Broadcasting Company, are under discussion by a parliamentary working party, headed by Centre Party MP Mika Lintilä.
      The working group are considering whether the fee should stay after 2010, or whether it should be replaced by budget financing, by putting commercials on YLE channels, or by some kind of hybrid model.
      The EUR 400 million has to be found from somewhere.
     
From the perspective of the party collecting the revenue, there is no need for change.
      “The system has worked well, even though no system such as this is completely watertight”, says Anssi Laakso from FICORA.
      The machinery required to police non-payers has been grumbled at, but it still brings in more income than it costs.
      Because of illegal viewing, the Communications Regulatory Authority sends out tens of thousands of letters every year to addresses that have not filed a TV-notification.
      Every tenth such letter brings a new notification.
      “And for direct marketing, I’d say that is a pretty good score”, ponders Laakso.
     
But FICORA also requires the services of the 83 inspectors who go around ringing doorbells.
      Something in the region of 20,000 secret viewers are exposed every year.
      One of these days, one of them may ring Kari’s doorbell, or Jussi’s, or Sanna’s.
      Or yours.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 22.3.2008
     
     
Note: The names of those persons interviewed - the non-payers - have been changed.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Financing YLE operations through digital TV smart card gets support (14.12.2007)
  Sharp decline in number of TV licences after switch to digital TV (6.11.2007)
  Digital television era comes in tonight (31.8.2007)
  Some 500 households in Finland still out of range of digital network (8.1.2008)

Links:
  Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA)

HEIKKI HELLMAN / Helsingin Sanomat
heikki.hellman@hs.fi