Licence to bill

Broadcasting is expensive business. Especially public broadcasting. Particularly in Germany - and that's due in part to the country's dark past. Horrified by the centralised Nazi broadcasting machine, the (West) German government built up a sprawling mass of public broadcasters over 40 years, all paid for by a licence fee on TV, Radio and latterly Internet use. 

Where the UK has the BBC, Germany has tens of organisations: There are 9 regional broadcasters who each run a range of TV and radio channels in their local areas; Germany's channel one (ARD Das Erste), run by a consortium of those regional broadcasters together with Deutsche Welle (the German government's international broadcaster); a national second station (ZDF); 3Sat run by ARD, ZDF, Swiss and Austrian public broadcasters; and finally, a range of satellite stations run by combinations of the above. A system designed to be so complex no single party could control it.

With the exception of the taxpayer-funded Deutsche Welle, all of the above is funded by the licence fee. In 2011, the combined income from licence fees was 7.3 billion euros (nearly twice the BBC's income). Just as in the UK (and perhaps more so) there are plenty of Germans who feel that this does not offer good value for money and refuse to pay - they do not register their devices with the licence collection agency GEZ which, like the UK equivalent, is run by the broadcasters themselves. Also like the UK equivalent, there is not much love lost between ordinary Germans and their TV licence collection agency.

With endemic avoidance and the assumption that all households must have a television, radio or computer (or even a 3G-capable mobile phone), the states approved the GEZ's request to simply charge a licence fee to every single household from 2013.

Of course, there have already been legal challenges - and the broadcasters risk shooting themselves in the foot: people might start questioning why the broadcasters need so much money...