Living
Television
The best you can say about German TV is that it’s relatively cheap. The market is overshadowed by public broadcasters, who are only allowed to get 10% of their budgets from advertising. This means you have to fund the rest. If you own a television or television-capable computer, you’re legally required to pay €17.03 a month to directly fund the public broadcasters.
After registering with the local authorities, expect official-looking letters from GEZ, the organisation that collects the fees. The fee covers one radio and one television per household. Clock radios, additional televisions and even car radios cost extra, though most ignore this provision. Discarding the letters will spark a visit from a representative but if no one answers the door, they have no way of knowing what you own. Be warned: getting caught not paying can mean fines and back payments.
The public broadcasters are led by national stations ZDF and ARD, known formally as Channel 1 and Channel 2 (Die Erste und Das Zweite). Their news programmes are top-notch and they produce a potpourri of other shows which vary widely in quality, excelling particularly in children’s programming. The system is backed by a range of regional broadcasters. Berlin has its very own, Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, or RBB, which produces local news shows and local programming.
About 60% of programming now comes from private, advertising-based broadcasters. They mostly run dubbed versions of last year’s best American and British shows and include channels such as ProSieben and Sat.1. There’s also the usual bevy of music channels as well as two private Berlin stations: TV Berlin and Fernsehen aus Berlin. Even if you want to watch free-to-air broadcasters you’ll still need a special set-top box since Berlin switched to terrestrial digital broadcasters several years ago. Check in with a local electronics store such as Saturn at Alexanderplatz for the box. With it, you can get all German public and private broadcasters, but no foreign stations such as CNN or BBC.
It would be odd to find an apartment or house not wired for cable and you can either opt for standard analogue cable for €15 a month or an upgraded digital package for a couple of euros more. The standard package will give you 50 channels including the public and private broadcasters as well as BBC World and CNN International and more shopping channels than you can use. Since only one cable company serves each apartment building, what you can get by upgrading depends on the company, though not much. Usually it’s pay-per-view movies, as well as additional services such as Bundesliga football matches or Formula One races.
After registering with the local authorities, expect official-looking letters from GEZ, the organisation that collects the fees. The fee covers one radio and one television per household. Clock radios, additional televisions and even car radios cost extra, though most ignore this provision. Discarding the letters will spark a visit from a representative but if no one answers the door, they have no way of knowing what you own. Be warned: getting caught not paying can mean fines and back payments.
The public broadcasters are led by national stations ZDF and ARD, known formally as Channel 1 and Channel 2 (Die Erste und Das Zweite). Their news programmes are top-notch and they produce a potpourri of other shows which vary widely in quality, excelling particularly in children’s programming. The system is backed by a range of regional broadcasters. Berlin has its very own, Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, or RBB, which produces local news shows and local programming.
About 60% of programming now comes from private, advertising-based broadcasters. They mostly run dubbed versions of last year’s best American and British shows and include channels such as ProSieben and Sat.1. There’s also the usual bevy of music channels as well as two private Berlin stations: TV Berlin and Fernsehen aus Berlin. Even if you want to watch free-to-air broadcasters you’ll still need a special set-top box since Berlin switched to terrestrial digital broadcasters several years ago. Check in with a local electronics store such as Saturn at Alexanderplatz for the box. With it, you can get all German public and private broadcasters, but no foreign stations such as CNN or BBC.
It would be odd to find an apartment or house not wired for cable and you can either opt for standard analogue cable for €15 a month or an upgraded digital package for a couple of euros more. The standard package will give you 50 channels including the public and private broadcasters as well as BBC World and CNN International and more shopping channels than you can use. Since only one cable company serves each apartment building, what you can get by upgrading depends on the company, though not much. Usually it’s pay-per-view movies, as well as additional services such as Bundesliga football matches or Formula One races.
