They Won

Sometime around 2006, RTL and Viacom decided that German satellite TV would be encrypted from then on. New receiver, monthly subscription, installation fees—the whole apparatus of corporate extraction. I was genuinely furious, not because I watched much, but because it was so baldly greedy. No innovation, no improvement, just the decision to charge for something people already had. When I found out ProSieben and the others would follow, it didn’t even feel like news. It felt inevitable.

I wanted to believe people would push back. That greed this obvious would collapse. But they just paid the fees, and the fees became normal, and somewhere along the way the public broadcast space just ceased to exist. Every platform learned the same lesson: find what people want, lock it behind a subscription, raise the price twice a year. Now everything works that way. We don’t even remember it being different.