Marcel Winatschek

The Privilege of Paying for Commercials

Starting in 2007, Germany’s major private television channels—RTL and its entire family of networks, plus MTV, Viva, and the incoming Comedy Central, which was set to carry South Park and Chappelle’s Show—announced they’d be encrypting their satellite broadcasts. No more free reception. You’d need a new receiver, a connection fee around fifty euros, and a monthly subscription on top of that. Just to keep watching the same ads and ringtone commercials you’d always watched for free.

The cynicism is breathtaking. These channels exist because they sell advertising. Their entire business model runs on people watching them for free. And now they want to charge a hardware fee plus a monthly rate for the privilege of being advertised at. That’s not a product. That’s a shakedown.

The grimmer part is that if RTL gets away with it, the others will follow—ProSieben, Sat.1, all of them—once the encryption platform proves it works. Then it becomes the new normal and nobody remembers when you could point a dish at the sky and just receive television. I hope they go broke doing it. I genuinely do. But I know they won’t.