The story
Buy As You View is the trading name for Buy As You View Holdings and Dunraven Finance Limited. Both are subsidiaries of BAYV Investments Limited.
Established in South Wales in 1972, initially as "Just Rentals", Buy As You View (since 1998), and still based in Bridgend, it operated in the North East, Yorkshire, the Midlands, the North West and Scotland and employed 700 staff nationally.
Repayments were originally made via a coin box in the customer's house, which representatives would call at to empty regularly. Later, repayments would be made online, via direct debit, or in cash. In each case, a payment meter connected to the customer's television set would deactivate the TV should payments be in default — regardless of whether the customer had financed the television with the company.
In 2016 Buy as You View compensated 59,000 customers a total of £939,000 for fees charged from 2001 onwards after the Financial Conduct Authority raised concerns about the company's treatment of customers in arrears, in particular the transparency of their fees and the practice of using payment meters to restrict customers' access to TVs.
In September 2017 the company was placed into administration after incurring what administrators EY described as "significant losses". On 3 June 2019 the company ceased to collect any further payments from customers, who were allowed to keep any items they had purchased.
From Wikipedia’s article on Buy As You View, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3