Letters from the Gebühreneinzugszentrale (GEZ)

Two of my least favourite people on the plant. I'm not sure that the payment system for the BBC and the GEZ and the media monsters barons that are Murdoch and Berlusoni are totally related.

Berlusconi is more about the abomination that is allowing politicians to own television and other media outlets.

It was confirmed to me that the letter we received was from a registered baliff, so we will be paying. I did confirm with my husband though today that he also never answered any GEZ letters etc. A mystery.

Anyway, as our children are growing up bilingual, perhaps they would like to watch the TV...

Cos these big media moghuls are amongst the key players to de-stabalise public broadcasting in Europe.
And they use arguments that you see reflected on here.

I have no problem providing funding to public broadcasters. But they shouldn't pretend it's a user pays system when it is plainly not. At the latest, it stopped being user pays the moment you had to pay it if you have an internet connection.

I have a problem with a large amount of money being wasted in determining who may or may not have a telly or a radio and then setting out to try to prove it. If they just stopped pretending and just insisted that every household contribute, then all those checkers wouldn't be needed and all those letters would no longer need to be sent and we'd all have to pay a lot less than what we do now and more money would actually reach the broadcasters. It's for the social good, just like I have to pay for schools and other services I don't use through my taxes. But this inefficient bullshit they go through and pretending it's user pays is what I find objectionable.

Been receiving these for years in various addresses, all filed in the round file.

Learn German and enjoy the awesome German TV.

You have a TV, you have to pay, that's the law. What's next? You do not want to pay taxes?

German TV sucks.. Most of is is badly dubbed 3 season old US reruns anyway..

Its not the law.. Its an agreement between GEZ and Govt. Remember GEZ is a PRIVATE ORGANIZATION. (Just like the RIAA, BPI or GEMA)

I Have many sharp knives too, which I can use to harm people. Should I be arrested for murder just for having them?

If GEZ was actually a license that was required for all TV/Radios/Computer equipment, they would issue a license/card which you
would be required to show at every store if/when you bought said items.

The GEZ is a legally protected funding body for state broadcasting. They need to prove you have a TV, radio or PC in order to enforce payment of statutory fees. They have no right of entry, blah, blah, blah, but if they believe they have proof you have the equipment then they have a right to enforce payment, if necessary through the courts. Proof could be a picture of your TV in your apartment through a window, the radio in a car registered to you, a receipt from the TV repairman or evidence of a subscription from a pay TV service (granted the last two are not absolute proof, but are strong contributory evidence). If they believe they have proof they will turn to the court and then the bailiff to enforce payment. If you really don't have a TV/radio/PC then you can clearly defend your position. If you do have one of these devices then your situation is weak, and the best you can do is mitigate ("I only got it last week...) to reduce the fee or charges.

Last time the GEZ wrote to me I sent them, using their enclosed envelope, menus from a pizza restaurant, a Chinese and a Thai in case they were hungry, an advert for holidays in Allgau, and an advert for an aromatherapy product, to help them relax. These products were carefully chosen from the week's junk mail to help them improve their otherwise miserable outlook on life, perhaps one day they'll get the point.

Don't forget to put glue in the fold at the top of the envelope. This will screw-up their letter opening machine and since the machine opens hundreds of letters a minute
they get a nice letter rain fall, or the machine just gets jammed with 100's of letters and takes lots of time to clean out.

YOU ARE TAFF!

No bleeding way. Yuck, yuck to both.

Don´t pay taxes either, we have salaries channelled through other countries.

And have been presumably instructed not to talk to strangers in the hallway of your building - particularly those who ask them what their favourite tv programmes are?

Doesn´t matter now, we are all legal as of today...

How so? Did you pay?

I assume you paid the requested €202? If so, then what did it cover? A radio and TV costs €51.09 per 3 month period, so €202 doesn't even cover a year, let alone any court costs...

I've been 'legal' with the GEZ for years, paying for the radio I have and not paying for the TV I don't have, but that doesn't stop the useless fucks at the GEZtapo writing me three increasingly threatening and patronising letters a year.

of course. if you deny have either, they will write you every so few months and ask "Did you get a t.v. or radio, yet?". What a waste of paper.

That's my biggest problem with the set-up.

Why not just have a flat fee for every household, regardless of whether they have a TV or not and do away with all the checking and the letters and the bullshit. That way we could all pay less and a greater % of what gets paid actually reaches it's intended destination.

You know what, I have no idea...I will put it on my "to do" list.

Maybe it's just me, but "checking the bill is correct" would be much higher up my "to do" list than "paying the bill"

That's the system they use in Japan, with a slight bit of "honour code" as in Germany, IIRC.
Shoving it all onto the tax register has issues ie ABC Australia, but we've been there before mate.

There ARE issues with German public broadcasting, particualry how it relates to minority communities (of which we are a VERY tiny minority with an overstated case of or own self importance sometimes) but to just say that German public broadasting is "crap" is a lazy comment from people who quite probably almost never watch or listen to it.

Or to those who have watched it and still think its crap, and nolonger watch it.. And haven't for many years..

Personally, I'd rather the people who actually use the service pay for it.

Well I don't use schools or homes for the elderly, and I'm not involved in other art projects that get public funding, but I still pay for them. I see a public broadcaster the same way.


Yeah we have - in that it's too easy for a government to threaten to lower funding if it gets bad press. However, if you keep the collecting authority independent and set it as a separate payment that all households must pay, then you lower the costs incurred by the agency (no checking, no millions of letters, etc), thus lowering the individual fee, while still making it difficult for the government to hold the public broadcaster to ransom...

I don't, to me television is far from a necessary service while the others are. I also object to public money going toward building big, stupid, sports arenas.

How about small, intelligent sports arenas?

I don't think the television as such is a necessary service. But I think independent media, not reliant on someone like Packer's money and bias, is something worth paying for.

Not only do you get unbiased news (in theory anyway), it also helps to keep other broadcasters honest.

Those ones are ok.


Perhaps it's worth paying for to you but I can read and can get my unbiased media in print form. You can pay for my share if you like.

I think it's in your personal interests for others to get unbiased news too...Whether you watch it or not.

I for one, prefer not to live in a society where a channel such as Fox News dominates ratings and most of the people I have to live with get their view of the world from there.

I think it's more in my personal interest to encourage people to stop vegetating in front of the television and pick up a newspaper or a book for a change.

There is absolutely no reason a person needs to watch television to stay informed.

Illiterate people should just remain ignorant of all issues in your opinion then?

I find this comment especially funny since we're on a forum populated by many people who can understand spoken German much much easier than written.

I agree, but most people do...so you have to make the best of that. Not funding public broadcasters (TV and Radio) wouldn't encourage people to stop watching and pick up a book, it only encourages people to watch even more dumbed down and more biased TV.

But if you have some good ideas of how you can encourage people to watch less TV and read more, then I'd be curious to hear them...

Yes, illiterate people should be burned at the stake. Kill all illiterate people!

In all seriousness, my issue is with television, not radio. Radio is pretty easy to incorporate while still accomplishing other things, when watching television most of us just zone out for hours on end, some even for days on end.

In all seriousness it was TV that helped me tremendously as I worked to learn the language: children's shows, game shows and films I'd already seen and could therefore follow more easily. I use the same trick to learn Icelandic. Subtitles are a bad crutch unless they're in the same language as the program itself.

woof.

Hypothetically could you not have used childrens books on tape to learn just as effectively, you could even have the book in front of you as you listen to the tape (which might help with spelling and grammar as well). Which generally wouldn't be an option with television.

What benefit did watching the TV have over listening to the story?

Either way, this is a need very specific to you, should the rest of us have to pay for things like this because it might be beneficial for the minority? If it's important to you, you can still pay for the programming.

I need to watch Jerry Springer because watching it makes me feel better about myself which stops me wanting to kill myself, perhaps the show should be publicly funded too.

Hypothetically nothing. I have a stack of Icelandic children's books and I had a few German children's books which I gave away, along with some reverse p-sy-kology English-for-German-speakers books. But tapes of children's books are few and far between. TV is excellent because everyone wirking in the business knows that first and foremost, you tell a story. That's easy to follow. TV is mostly stupid. This is excellent when you're trying to learn a language.

> What benefit did watching the TV have over listening to the story?
TV WAS listening to the story, and watching it unfold so that even if I didn't understand the words, I was able to grok.

> Either way, this is a need very specific to you
Au contraire, my Soviet Canuckistani friend. I have received many thanks for my suggestions on how to use TV to learn the language, and not just German.

woof.

I learned a lot of German from TV as well. Thanks Al Bundy!!!