Focus brought up an interesting story today from the online magazine DWDL.
The topic? There is this discussion going on ARD (the German public TV network) to reform itself....in essence becoming a 'shop-window' for state networks (the sub-networks that exist now).
Even the discussion of this idea.....got the German Cultural Council all hyped up. All of this comes up at the end of this week when state Prime Ministers are meeting in an annual conference, and the topic is being listed as a item to be talked about.
You can divide German TV into two chunks....public TV and private TV. The commercial side has been around since the mid-1980s and met a lot of hostility by the public TV crowd. Just about every single conceivable angle to halt them and their creation...was attempted.
What you see today for public TV is one 'mother-hen' (ARD)....which takes the pot of money and distributes it into the 'sister-hen' (ZDF), the public radio network, and roughly twenty sub-networks (some state-related, some kid-related, some art-related young-people-related).
The general commentary by the bulk of Germans under the age of thirty is that it's a growing number who aren't watching public TV. My son (German in nature) will vouch that it's been now ten years since he last watched a single minute of German public-TV. The bulk of what he watches is data-streaming from Netflix and Amazon, with an occasional hour or two per month from the commercial networks.
If you do the numbers....in about a decade, you will have about fifty-percent of the general public who aren't interested in supporting state public-TV anymore. It'll flip into a political topic and someone will convince the public to either dismantle the public TV system entirely, or downsize it in a dramatic way. I think this discussion here with the German Cultural Council is simply the opening of this political topic.
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