[blackbear_]

Industries that rely on TV are a cancer refusing to die. People here are forced by law to pay more than 200 EUR per year to the national TV broadcaster even when they don't own a TV. The reason? They still receive the signal, thus they could watch TV if they wanted. BS. /rant

[t-writescode]

Generally, I've heard very wonderful things about the Public Broadcasting Station here in the United States and would be happy if $200 per year of my taxes went to them.

[freeflight]

In Germany the problem is that it's a fee that is flat per household, so a young single with barely any income has to pay just as much as a family with 2 incomes or a shared apartment with a bunch of people, each household has to pay the same 210€ per year regardless of number of users or actual consumption.

A lot of the programming is really dated and mostly appealing to somewhat older folks, with tons of regional broadcasters having several versions of folks music festival shows.

There's some interesting online-content aimed at younger audiences like ZDFNeo, Tagesschau does some decent reporting but kills any comment section hours after release, if they open them at all. I enjoy content co-produced with ARTE like documentaries, but all of that has zero retention.

German public broadcasting laws do prohibit them from storing their content for an indefinite time, which the private media industry lobbied for as they feared public broadcasters would build massive libraries "distorting the market". This even applies to publicly funded news portals like Tagesschau [0] where articles will often be deleted after a year or ARTE documentaries that are only streamable for like 3 months, to then vanish in distribution/publisher limbo for sometimes years before they can be bought.

[0] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/rundfunkaenderungsstaatsver...

[yohannparis]

I understand your frustration, but the public library, museums, schools, or roads, for that matter, follow the same funding scheme.

In a pure capitalist world, you pay as you go, but in reality, people want common public goods funded by the public regardless of use.