Saturday, March 17, 2018

Danish TV Update

Focus carried a brief article this morning, talking about Denmark and this new law passed late in the week.  The Danish government had a lot of public pressure put on them and so they decided to saddle-up with the public.

Danish public TV has been for several decades....a monthly tax deal upon each household.  The amount per house....was 335 Euro yearly (2492 DKK).  This basically paid for various radio stations and six public TV channels.

So the new law is that the money will come straight out of the national budget.....that DR (the controlling organization) must take a 20-percent pay-cut.  No one says where the cut will be....one might assume that one of the networks (of the six) will disappear, and some folks will lose their jobs.

The basic problem in Denmark, which is the same problem in Germany.....you have more and more young people who are avoiding public TV entirely and think the monthly household tax is unfair. 

What was the monthly deal created in the first place?  Everyone felt that as governments come and go.....that political folks would attach themselves to the networks and try to manipulate them. The fact that networks might go on their own, and create their own slant on things....siding with various politics or campaigns?  Well....yeah, that was the other situation to this discussion.

All of this will come to affect the German public TV system eventually.....that's my humble opinion. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Back in the early 2000 when I was still living in Germany I had a subscription for radio only as I did not own a TV and computers were not counted yet under the TV 'tax'. There was this guy appearing at my door step insisting I would have an TV and I have to pay for it (I was streaming what I needed back then already). He was harassing me for half an hour, threatening me to come back with police, and tried to get entry to my flat to check whether I was telling the truth.
This all did not help to get a positive feeling for the public broadcast system and how they harassed you for getting more money out of you.