So utterly unbelievable

As in many countries, we have a mandatory TV license fee that every household that has a TV set (or a DVR, VCR, etc.) must to pay according to the law. At 200€ a year the fee isn’t that heavy. But when considering value-for-money, it totally sucks. YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company, finances 90% of it’s operations with the TV license fees , with which it manages to run two TV channels. Two mostly worthless channels. And a bunch of equally worthless radio stations. The quality of every produced public service minute is nothing compared to BBC in the UK (where the license fee is close to what we have). YLE even competes with commercial channels on certain programming that has guaranteed commercial interest e.g. many sports events and imported sitcoms – with money I’m supposed to pay. For comparison, I spend 11€ a month (132€ annually) and get close to 20 wonderful premium cable channels (cnn, 4 discovery channels, bbc prime, etc. etc.). All delivered to me digitally by a non-government owned cable company. High income, low income, work, no work, student, elderly; all pay the same fee.

Now, I do understand why the TV license fee exists, and the reason we need YLE. But what I wonder is what they are going to do once broadcast media (as we know it today) will without doubt disappear during the next 20 years, being replaced with on-demand content. In every culture and country there exists a need for producing and providing programming that isn’t commercially viable – but why not do it through normal tax income and not a brain-dead license fee.

Hiring close to 100 goons to run after people who do not pay the license fee while spending a lot of money on advertisement isn’t the solution. The reason why I’m so upset is that I had one of the goons knocked on my door this evening – I politely shut the door before his nose. Wonder when they will introduce a service for ratting out on your neighbors..