Why was the original title changed? They aren't open sourcing anything today.
They are planning to develop new tech which they might open source. But all this still has to be approved by the regulator and the government.
That said, I have seen some of the tech from the inside ~10 years ago. The ARD player was developed by a third party and there was no budget to bring this in house. Things might have changed but redoing everything just to open source it sounds like a waste of money.
The original German article makes it clear it's only about the web front end and some ancillary services, not the video streaming service as such. The latter seems to be mostly Akamai-based.
Exactly, that's why I wrote "the player" which is the most interesting tech.
The rest of the system wasn't very interesting back in the day, just an off-the-shelf CMS and internal feeds to pull in all the content from the different channels automatically.
The sites have changed quite a lot since then and they have added subscription content as well. Maybe they now have code which would be more interesting to open source.
Sigh. I know that dunking on the EU is increasingly a HN meme because most of you lot work for companies that feel threatened by governments with teeth, but “governments waste money!!!” in as much as it is an accurate stereotype is not localised to the EU by any means.
I was about to call that the Rundfunkbeitrag is not legally a tax (Steuer), but a tax (Beitrag). For some reason that difference does not seem to exist in English and it translates to the same word??
It doesn't matter if it's masquerading as a license fee, it's by all means a tax - it's required by law and you go to jail if you do not pay it and you have to pay it even if you don't want to consume their content.
In France we used to have the "Redevance audiovisuelle" which just like in German didn't use the same word. It was removed in 2022 but according to Wikipedia[1], this is what Germany is using. The french version has a European maps with the different sources of financement used in European TV broadcasting services.
Beitrag Wikipédia pages are available in other languages, namely Swedish and Esperanto. The meaning doesn't exactly match German's.
A specific "tax" just for TV/radio exists in many European countries, definitely not just Germany. And in general, there are many tax-like things out there where it's mandatory to pay them in specific circumstances and they go to a specific use.
I'd translate "Beitrag" literally to "contribution", maybe add a "mandatory" as qualifier.
The key difference is that taxes are completely under discretion of parliamentary control, whereas the Rundfunkbeitrag is under discretion of the individual broadcast authority governance boards (which are too closely tied to politicians for my comfort, but that's another thing).
Licence/License. (maybe like the BBC licence fee?)
Levy. (see below)
There is also the concept of the hypothicated tax. The only exemplar I know is the Australian Medicare levy, the money is solely to be used, and spent on Medicare, and no other purpose enshrined in law. People often claim petrol tax was designed to pay for roads infrastructure but it wasn't legally bound, and is not a hypothicated tax. Nor is the ULEZ and like costs to drive in the inner city with a petrol engine. They are designed to discourage use of ICE not to pay for them.
It doesn't exist because the distinction is meaningless. The government forcing you to pay money to a government (adjacent) institution is a tax for all practical purposes.
A Beitrag is bound to a well defined objective which means it is determined what the money will be used for at the moment it is collected whereas a Steuer contributes to the household as such.
Also, public TV is not controlled by the government but by a council that is more or less democratic. Still far from perfect, sure
> Also, public TV is not controlled by the government but by a council that is more or less democratic. Still far from perfect, sure
Of the countries I lived in, the quality of the broadcasting and reporting in Germany has been the better one so far.
And when you see the flow of vomit produced by most of the private television in the countries around, you realise that the compromise is not perfect, but it's nonetheless miles ahead of most other options.
You also quickly realise that most private channels are owned by powerful players pushing their own agenda, which can bring even more bias and one-sidedness.
Equivalent might be a bond paid by tax payers. The money collected is used only for a specific purpose, but you cannot avoid paying it. For me, a tax goes into a general fund that is budgeted for common use while a special purpose bond (or a tax) is money collected for a singular purpose and accounted as such.
The difference between Steuer and Beitrag is an artificial distinction that the German government has made in their laws. It has not much to do with the language itself. It's just that because German language is not used much outside Germany, official government terms and language basically get conflated.
If I’m understanding the concept correctly, in the USA we describe that kind of tax as “earmarked” which is a reference to folding the corner of a page in a book to mark your place.
> "Earmark" comes from the livestock term, where the ears of domestic animals were cut in specific ways so that farmers could distinguish their stock from others grazing on public land.
I think contribution is a much higher level word that is way too abstract to be useful in this context.
When I think of "Contributions" I think of a voluntary transfer of money, whether from an individual to an organization or from an individual to themselves (like "contributions" to an IRA or 401k for example). But a contribution could even be sharing ideas with a group of friends (contributing to the conversation) or anything really.
The key difference is that the government never touches the money anywhere between citizen and broadcaster, to avoid unwarranted influence. I assume that people who know the British term know that, as the German one is surely modeled after the BBC. I'm writing for other readers.
The downside is that it's a per head (or per household) sum, not coupled to income like taxes would be. This is usually explained away by the fee being separate from the state, but the reality is that Germany actually has it all implemented, in the form of the opt-in "church tax" coupled to taxable income just like regular tax. Handled by the tax office, but not going too government coffers. Would be so easy to extend the implementation to public broadcasting, because you don't pay to consume the media, you pay to live in an environment that is not dominated by profit-driven broadcasting media. There are many negative things to say about our public broadcasting, but when I look at other countries that don't have strong public broadcasting, it's so much the lesser evil, totally worth the fee.
(personally, I'd love to see that "church tax implementation" opened up to all kinds of opt-in membership organisations that would see value in income-coupled membership fees, I believe that a lot of good things could work that way, with people of all income levels enjoying an objectively fair way of contributing)
This often a complicated case regarding competition law. In our neoliberal world giving away something for free that was subsidized is often seen as destroying market. The national CIO of Germany at one time recommended public bodies to us copyleft (also the EC opted for EPL) , rather than putting it into public domain. I also like this idea. However, this is fundamentaly different from the US. The German weather service even had to shutdown some functions in their free app due to a court order.
As a loophole, they ended up making the app paid as not constitute disloyal competition, which, depending on the angle makes sense: you have a competitor that you can actually never compete because regardless of what they do, their funding never runs out. It’s not a fair battle. On the other hand tho, wetter online were crying like little kids about an app that was doing what a government was supposed to do.
I would rather have a model where anyone can contribute and can see the code, if they want to, than a model, where there is "competition" of who can make the shittiest but most profitable broadcast system.
Thanks, I strongly feel that publicy-funded software should be at least open source if not public domain, but the market impact is a wrinkle I hadn't considered before.
One would hope so, but they don't even open the shows for public use, they don't even keep them around so people can watch the things they had to pay for.
Here in Israel they just upload most of their TV content to YT, some if it is really good. They used to also stream (and archive) their news stuff, but for some reason I'm getting a 404. (You can look up Kan11 and Kan11news if you are curious, though I don't think they have translations so probably not useful if you don't speak Hebrew).
EDIT: Looks like it is only broken for me in FireFox...
That was the case in Germany too, at least for a few years.
They've since changed their tune and ceased uploading whole episodes, only excerpts go onto YouTube now with links to their own "Mediathek".
From my understanding they're doing so because the content is paid for by public money, and YouTube is a foreign for-profit company. So they were essentially spending the citizens money to provide content to a private entity that's headquartered abroad
> From my understanding they're doing so because the content is paid for by public money, and YouTube is a foreign for-profit company. So they were essentially spending the citizens money to provide content to a private entity that's headquartered abroad
That's one thing, but IIRC the larger part was that the private broadcasters whined as they always do.
The day of that news was the day I uninstalled all private weather apps I had been using and bought DWD. I figured if they want to play that game, they gotta live with the consequences.
I've since been encouraging everyone I know to do the same, and I never forget to tell this backstory.
Besides, DWD is hands down the single best weather app in the DACH region anyway.
There is still the "Funk" part of programming that targets people under 30. Almost all the content produced under that umbrella is available on YouTube (or Facebook, Instagram, TikTok), based on the realism that that's what's needed to reach the youth.
German TV is doing that too, but there are harsh limitations on what they can make available and how long it can stay online, because private broadcaster sued them 20 something years ago. Since then, the rules change from time to time, and Public Broadcaster are carefully exploring what they really can do.
To understand the quality level of their current platforms: they actually manage to recommend the same stream you just watched as the next auto-play entry and even might jump directly into the credits again, giving you a 10 to 20 seconds loop in extreme cases.
While a two-stream recommendation loop is quite common in both systems, the loop above only happened twice for me so far. Still, it might just perfectly highlight the lack of passion and user focus plaguing their current platforms.
So, whatever they come up with in the new and maybe open one... ah, who am I kidding.
If you stream via Chromecast, you can see your connection getting dropped by adaptive bitrate streaming in realtime.
It's always low quality, medium quality, high quality, ultra high quality, lag, then low quality again. You cannot change it to a fixed level manually too, on the Chromecast.
They are possibly illegal or at least against the law's spirit, which is ironic, because Heise is a relatively well respected publisher among German IT professionals.
I think they are legal because the requirement is that you have an option to "deny all" which they provide. That you must subscribe to the "Pur-Abo" to use this option doesn't matter.
I am p sure that not too long ago the EU Commission put out a statement regarding Metas "Consent or Pay" and it not being allow and "privacy isn't something you should need to pay for". So I don't think its legal, but I also didn't look too much into it other than some headlines.
I don’t think that’s right. You can’t force someone to pay to not have tracking cookies (or something that infringes on the right to privacy). Facebook tried the same tactic and was forced to stop.
German public broadcaster has enough budget to send humans to the Moon. Still better than nothing, they could simply traditionally increase the fee without anything new in return. Any news from them them is a slap in the face and is assuring me that moving out of Germany was a good decision.
Not exactly the most ambitious project, is it. Besides the fact that both ARD and ZDF majorly struggle with the content itself in terms of quality and availability (it's not an archive, everything disappears quickly). One day they'll figure out this internet neuland thing ;)
Unfortunately, not making archived content available longer is due to the legal obligations that the public broadcasters face and that the German Government and the governments of the federal states themselves have put in place because of anti-competitive fear mongering.
I wouldn't call it "anti-competitive fear mongering" when one player in the market can rely on a virtually guaranteed income (you'd have to be homeless to avoid the Rundfunktbeitrag) while newspapers, private TV and radio have to fight for survival. ARD and ZDF buying and thus supporting the insane amounts that some sport events cost in license fees doesn't do FIFA and IOC any good as scandals of recent years have shown. Carlos Nuzman who ran the 2016 games got 30 years for his corruption schemes.
Of course they can and are welcome to, but even though I agree with many things any variations of the past German governments have brought into law it doesn't mean I have to agree on all of them. And let's be honest: The TV and radio landscape has opened a lot over the past nine decades, unlike print media it had a few decades of being shielded from competition but why does it have to continue like this?
the article does not say if the public has a stake in the private entity created to do this, which makes me curious why this path was chosen in the first place
This is great. It fits with how they're adopting Mastodon. Why isn't NPR officially adopting Mastodon? The fact that Truth Social exists should motivate NPR even more, as it could be accused of being pro-Trump while staying on Twitter. In Germany, no platform is run by any particular candidate, and they still went to Mastodon.
A large part of that is "thanks" to IP licensing laws. A lot of stuff can be shown on TV with no issues, but not streamed or, in some extreme cases like Cold Case, sold as physical media.
You have to pay a fee if you live in Germany. It does not matter what kind of technology you have access to in theory. Thank god the German state does not have to check whether or not you have to own a TV.
ca. 2015, you have to pay it anyway, with no exemptions
ca. 2020, they start randomly sending out delay penalties, even if you are late by days, without ever notifying you of the due dates
ca. 2022, they sneakily shift the 3-months fee forward, first you can pay it at the end of the period, then in the middle month, then soon at the beginning
meanwhile, the programming gets worse and worse every year. Then they get surprised if people vote for parties which promise to abolish it.
If you vote for fascists - whose lead candidates seem to be spying for Russia and China - because of a 17€ license fee per month, then you should reevaluate your perspective on the public broadcasting system and on money.
If you don't want people who don't care for TV or Radio (they do exist) to vote for AfD then you shouldn't have introduced a Rundfunkbeitrag that's very unpopular with many more. Scandals about money being badly spent just adds to the distrust and lack of interest people have in ARD, ZDF etc.
The current Rundfunkbeitrag which forces everyone to pay for something regardless wether they own a TV or radio, was introduced on January 1st 2013 and AFD was founded on February 6th the same year. Are 35 days a significant difference?
I didn't mind the old system to finance ARD/ZDF/... as I don't care about TV or radio and choose not to have either, but the new system is just not fair.
The French were smart enough to change their funding to be drawn from the general state budget: Less effort and no more grumpy people like me.
The hate and complains about the Rundfunkbeitrag was always there, this did not start in 2013 or with the AFD. And the AFD today is very different from the original AFD in 2013, which didn't care about this.
Would agree with that, but just very briefly: the main characteristic that defines fascism is a strong cult of personality. The Afd doesn't have that at all. They also don't display any kind of expansionist ambitions, but are rather nationalistic in an isolationist kind of way similar to most of the right-wing populists who have gained popularity throughout Europe. I have very little doubts that some of the hardliners in the party and possibly even some of the more moderate people are authoritarian, but fascists they are not.
These court rulings mainly rely on laws around freedom of expression which sometimes contain some quirks around the possibility of being able to prove something. The courts didnt declare AfD politicians fascists.
They are planning to develop new tech which they might open source. But all this still has to be approved by the regulator and the government.
That said, I have seen some of the tech from the inside ~10 years ago. The ARD player was developed by a third party and there was no budget to bring this in house. Things might have changed but redoing everything just to open source it sounds like a waste of money.