German order, German thoroughness
 

Well, it is true that he hasn't paid his TV license.

You can't escape the taxman, Mr. Schiller! :lol:

Wait..

you germans have an annual fee on owning a TV and radio??

what the hell for?!

It goes into a fund which Uwe Boll uses to make more crappy movies :doh:

For paying for public TV.
Our public radio and TV network is modelled on the BBC, only that we don't have one channel but a lot of them. Used to be one channel for every state, but some have merged.
There's a common channel of the state stations, the ARD plus an independent second channel, the ZDF.
Also, while BBC is free of commercials, ARD and ZDF are allowed commercial breaks before 1800 and "sponsored by" ads later.
But the bulk of the financing comes through license fees, which are collected by the GEZ (society for fee collection).
In contrary to the BBC, DF cars were never employed in Germany

I'm not so sure about public TV. They make great programs like Phoenix or Arte, and the news (like with the BBC) are simply far better than those of commercial TV.
However, there was a sharp drop in quality in recent years, with Telenovelas and all that stuff.
Also, there was some scandal with product placement.
Yesterday, the former head of sports coverage of the Hesse state network was sentenced to two years in prison for Fraud.
He did all contracts through a rights agency silently owned by his wife
An actual prison (not probation) sentence for a non-violent crime is something almost unheard of

Australia actually has a fee for the ABC services but it is taken from the consolidated revenue fund that our Taxation goes into. Don't you remember those 8c per day ads?

It's a little bit more visible here in the UK regarding our money going towards funding the national broadcaster unlike back home in Oz.

Ehehehehehe! They are similar stories around the world! Here in Portugal there was also a TV annual tax, which one paid to the state, for owning a television etc. This ended possibly during the 80´s. During the time of tax, when one person switch television, they had to tell the finances of that change, so the tax would pass it to the new television. Almost like cars taxes!
My father best man (in the wedding) continuated to received the letter to pay this tax, of the older television that he had. After a number of letter's explaining that the TV was no more, he continuated to receive the letter, until he just send it one last letter saying: " Dear Sir, go to (bad/rude word in portuguese that IMHO does not have a english translation). Best regards and signaded!
That was the best thing since they stop sending letters.

Quote:

mistakenly sent letters to "Mr. Friedrich Schiller" - which arrived at a primary school bearing his name.

Similar thing was one day in the Mineralogical and Geologic Museum of the University of Coimbra, which have the name of José Bonifácio d’Andrada e Silva Gallery.
One day, the headmaster or the president of the faculty (can't remember now) telephones there to say that he can not attend the meting with doctor José Bonifácio because he had another compromise!!! And to help the story, the telephone receptionist had a particular way to talk, she couldn't say the R's, and so, she says the G word instead. So she had to tell him, that Mister José Bonifácio d’Andrada e Silva was dead, almost 250 years...

In principle I'm fine with the german TV tax system, but unfortunately the emerging of private TV during the late 80s led to a competition that saw the number of TV channels increasing, but general quality degrading constantly, with the last years having seen a free fall. The pirvates finance themselves by plenty of adverts, and i am happy to pay a tax for not having my program interuoted every 15 minutes for 7-10 minutes, or have adverts fading in and out in the running program- and ruins the program, and completely so. but the privates with largely garbage-TV put the public stations under so much pressure that they

a.) had to raise their taxes (which is an anachronism when at the same time ever private household is expected to manage his existence with less, why are public institutions spared from that),

b.) started to copy the garbape-patterns of private TV and statretd to procude the same garbage - this time with my money

c.) using the taxes to start financing off-purpose operaitons like internet presences (you now also have to pay the TV tax if you do not own a TV, but have an internet access, even if it is just 28 modem - but almost nobody watches the internet presences of the public stations)

d.) allow political parties to have started years ago to massively project their influence and party's desires to change the orientation of programs and the way in which news is reported, and office positions are manned,

e.) waste hilarious, ridiculous, laughable, monumental ammounts of money to pay licence fees for some f#ucking football live coverage,

f.) waste money for a special channel that features boring life coverage of parliamentary debates (quotas are constantly falling), and another channel, ARTE, coproduced with then French, also has constantly detoriated in quality and has lost tremendously in quotas.

The system has seen it's best times long time ago, and then it was good. But now it just is annoying.

On German TV market, we have more channels to choose from, put the quality of choices available has become constantly poor and poorer. I prefer to have far less channels, but better ones. Of the 27 channels I get, you can delete two thirds immediately, and it wouldn't be considered a loss. We also were happy when we had a choice of just three, in my childhood, with antenna and a small black-and-white-portable. what I mean: having plenty of TV and radio is no essential of life, but today has become even a danger: that of cultural mass manipulation..

The BBC is the UK's greatest cultural ambassador.
There are not that many places in the world not coved by the world service or BBC news.

Outside schools, it is quite possibly the biggest single educator of the people.

Not to mention entertainment, hard journalism, BBC Parliament etc.

I actually wished we had something like this over here. I think the average citizen needs to be on in the politics of it's own country. I think the greatest problem with out system, is Apathy, we don't care what happens, 50% of the people vote, they select someone to represent them, and then this person gets to do whatever he wishes until its election time again.

While having a TV station dedicated to just what is happening in House and Senate would not make more people interested in politics, it would let those who are watch it, and see in person what is actually happening, without having the spin you get from a journalists. Who knows, it might even help promote a revolutionary new concept..... accountability.

The german system has some distinct differences to the classic BBC.
I heard the BBC is not what it used to be either, though

- Federalism: Originally, every single german state was supposed to have a radio/TV station.
That's right, some dozen BBCs, each with the same convoluted, semi-political structure the original BBC had.
Some merged, leaving about half a dozen large ones (HR, WDR, BR, MDR, SWR, NDR) plus two diminutive ones (RBB, Radio Bremen), but the latter does only radio.
At EVERY one of the six major state station has the budget of the whole BBC!
Today, the organisation varies from quasi-private (MDR) to old fashioned BBC style (HR, WDR).
ARD is the federally broadcast joint Channel of those eight.
Add to that the independent federal second channel ZDF, which was instituted in the 1960s after the supreme court had stopped Adenauer's attempt at private television.
Adenauer wanted another television network because he regarded the contemporary TV people as a bunch of commies :D

Problem is, large sports events like football championships and olympic games are always covered by both ARD and ZDF, with both stations alternating coverage daily.
In Bejing, ARD and ZDF sent more than twice as many people to the Olympics, yet managed to produce only about half as much coverage as the BBC.

Regarding the additional channels, I love Arte (joint Franco-German), Phoenix and 3Sat (joint German-Austrian-Swiss), but you could never run those channels on a profit oriented basis.
Phoenix is more than a german CSpan.
They cover many Bundestag debates on weekday afternoons, but the majority of their programs is documentaries and news.
Problem is, the public TV seems to think that "we got rid of our intellectual viewers via Arte and Phoenix, now we can dumb down the program on the regular channels".

Well, Slovenia has the same system as Germany. We must all pay a certain amount of money in order to get the national TV and radio. The only problem is, there are no limitations to adverts and our national television has come exceedingly to the amount of adverts private station have. Plus the quality of our programmes has never been any good (in comparison with the BBC) and they are deteriorating every year. We have awful spin-offs of different humorist series and each one is worst them the last one :damn:

Yet contrary to what Germany has seen in private TV proliferation, Slovenia has seen in the printed media. In the last few years, several new newspapers of different quality and content amount has sprout out and many of them are those free everyday newspapers. My God, we have so many, they are left around to rot in the streets and in schools. People only use them to solve crosswords. Then when there are reports as to which newspaper is the most read one, they come out number one (of course, as by the end of the day, there is none to be found).

Don't even get me started on what this newspapers dare to write. I have a feeling, every newspaper I take into my hands, being old with a considerable history, or a new one, all I'll hear is gossip and public manipulation. Yet now I have deviated from the topic of this thread.

I agree completely, and in my opinion Frankie Boyle on Mock The Week is worth the licence fee alone :D

NSFW links:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lrCAPV2V7xs

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=4yjJFt3uFVw

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=srJ6Sd_nGrk