The absurdity in the UK is that it's a License fee and that there is this whole absurd enforcement system. In other countries it's a tax if you don't pay it, you are essentially not paying your taxes. I am OK with a universal tax for a universal service even if I don't use that service. What I am not okay with is fraudulent threatening letters, weirdos creeping in the bushes trying to see if I am watching TV and goons showing up at my front door to collect what they think I owe them.
Had a white van with huge antennas parked out front for a few days when they were refusing to believe that a large share house of young people didn't watch TV. This was in 2015. We didn't own a TV nor watch.
The van soon left after a few days but left a full bottle of yellow liquid. Makes a fun story, but yeah they threaten you a bunch and it's quite sad.
I lived on the Isle of Man for a few years back in the 90's. The white van would be spotted on the ferry coming over and a small notice in the paper would appear. Everyone hid their TVs for a couple of weeks, until the paper said the van was back on the ferry.
It sounds so farcical now, in our age of ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.
It's the same situation in German except they removed the TV requirement since the broadcasters put up token online content that you can watch/read on your phone an surely everyone has one of those. So no more visits from cunts trying to get you or your co-inhabitants to admit that you have a TV because ist now a 100% mandatory fee but it's still not officially a tax though and therefore collected by a non-government entity who have had to rebrand due to how unpopular they are.
When I was studying at the university, I shared a privately owned house with some other people. We did not have a TV license, but I wanted to buy a big screen TV to use as computer monitor in my room.
I found out that in my country you can have a third-party, approved technician come to your house to disable the tuner portion of your TV so that you would not have to pay any television license. Around this time analog broadcasting was already being phased out or had already completely shut down in my country. And although some kind of digital broadcasting over air-waves exists to replace it, most people do not use that. Instead, you'll typically buy a subscribtion via cable or via IPTV or via sattelite, all of which come with a separate box that plugs into your TV via HDMI instead of relying on the tuner in your TV, even if that tuner can decode digitally broadcast radio signals. So the tuner in the TV was not serving much of a purpose anyway, even if I'd ever want to use the TV as a TV.
I paid a technician a bit of money to come disable the tuner for me in my newly bought 55" LED TV. I was imagining that he'd be opening the TV and carefully removing some essential part. What he actually did was take a plier and break the input for the tuner and then put a small piece of tape over it. Simple solutions, I guess. Then, I think I also got them to write a letter for me confirming that the tuner had been disabled.
It cost me a little bit of money, but not too much. Less than paying the TV license fee for that and subsequent years I was staying in that house anyway.
These days, I still have the TV. I put it in my grandfather's house a few years ago so he could use it. He already pays TV license fee and has a digital receiver. It has HDMI out which goes in to the TV. So he is not inconvenienced by the broken tuner input of the TV either, just like I expected back then that this disabling of the tuner would never be a problem even if I ever wanted to use it as a TV.
It does seem kind of silly now, that I paid someone to come break the input for a portion of the TV that was never going to be needed even if you wanted to use it as a TV. But I still think it was worth it, and that it saved me from worrying about inspections. Even though no inspection ever happened at the house either back in the days where I was using it as a monitor for my computer.
I remember that in Poland electronic repair shops offered companies removal of the TV demodulator from TV sets used as monitors. That was necessary for the TV not to count as a TV receiver and thus not to generate the fee liability.
I think there also were some large cases where a company who owned a car fleet had to pay for the car radios.
This fee is hot topic in Germany. Our French friends also enjoy ARTE[1] but seem not to suffer anymore from this ridiculous fee.
Actually I’m surprised that the Swiss fee is even higher, despite everything in the Swiss is expensive.
[1] Big parts of our public television suck. But ARTE is awesome!
While the public television may suck, it still pays for the only real Independent news coverage in Germany. No matter what you think of the ARD or ZDF and their management boards, the work of the Deutschlandfunk and regional broadcasters is outstanding and a pillar of a free democracy.
I hate having to pay for distribution licenses for soccer games, but if that ensures continued support for high-quality journalism, so be it.
You say that, but I highly doubt you actually listen to the radio or podcast formats or view lots of the ZDF productions that are very much critical of the established parties, and regularly publish investigative research.
Journalists tend to have a high education background and thus tend to hold more progressive and liberal opinions, but that’s unavoidable. The public broadcast services are still miles ahead in terms of unbiased reporting than privately owned publications in Germany.
And having said all that; would you really want to have to choose between Fox News and ABC? Journalism should not depend on private interests. I’m not claiming it’s free of political influence either, but at least public broadcast includes provisions to prevent that. The alternative is worse.
It sounds like you have lost your tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to acknowledge things aren’t merely black or white. I don’t blame you; it’s common these days.
DLF is the other high quality program aside from ARTE!
Regarding the content, it is for all and it is fine that 90% are not interesting for me. I struggle with the selection of news presented by ARD/ZDF, missing positiv news.
Soccer is interesting for many but I don’t get why the stream it live and remove it afterwards from the archives. If the organizer doesn’t want public reports with images I would exclude them. More time for broad reports about other sports (cycling, chess, esports…).
As a UK resident and TV owner (who does not need a license), I wouldn't even mind that much if I was required to pay just for TV ownership. It's the "enforcement" system that's utterly broken (although I have no idea how it compares to other countries).
We have this ridiculous situation where I'm not required to pay (so I don't), yet the TV licensing people are allowed (required?) to send me junk mail week after week trying to trick me into thinking I do need to pay them.
that seems fine to me. whatever they want to call it, if it applies to everybody it's just a tax and they're using tax dollars to fund some TV content and/or infrastrcture. that's all totally normal.
the absurd part is restricting that tax to only people who watch TV, and trying to do surveillance and enforcement to determine whether or not somebody is eligible for a TV tax.
The whole scheme seems like something an American would come up with: paying for public services with regressive user fees instead of broad-based progressive taxation.
But it's unheard of (for media[1]) in the US and common in Europe.
[1]The closest thing we have here might be parking passes for state parks, even unpopular ones where free parking would remain mostly empty.
Well, first they wanted to tax everyone a bit to pay for the BBC. And then someone said that would let the government easily pressure the BBC by withholding funds. And then someone said let's let the BBC collect it's own tax then. And someone else said that would be illegal to make people pay for the BBC if they aren't actually receiving any services from the BBC. And so here we are. So they wrote in this provision that in practice exempts precisely zero people but everyone tries to chase after anyway, contorting themselves through hoops to make it apply.
"Any services from the BBC" means any. TV broadcast, radio broadcast, or internet streaming. And because the actual intention was to make everyone pay, the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one. If you have a computer and the Internet, you could receive internet streaming.
And then you have more stupid rules, like even though they're collecting a tax, they're not tax collectors so they don't have any authority to come into your house, so they invent weird ways to detect if you have a TV or not.
Presumably a left wing government would remove all this stuff and just make it a tax.
This isn't accurate, that's just what they want people to think. In practice it exempts most people below the age of about 30, most of whom do not consume any media within the scope of the TV license.
> the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one.
That's not true. You're allowed to own equipment capable of receiving licensed broadcasts, all that matters is that you don't.
Seems close enough. The article even discusses how it is "often considered a compensation for illegal file sharing". And even if it's common, that doesn't make it any less unfair. (Indeed, the longest section of the article is titled "Questions on fairness".)
Yeah, Austria had the british system for a while, but after everyone started streaming (because the content is better and prices are actually cheaper) they changed it so every household needs to pay.
Now I'm forced to pay for old sitcoms, astrology shows, soccer stuff and other useless things I don't watch anyways...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence