It’s not a tax tho? At least not in Germany. It’s going directly to the state-broadcasting service but unconditionally; the idea being it’s harder to influence the content or threaten them with cutting off their funding.
This is also the case in Austria according to https://orf.beitrag.at/faq/allgemein so whether to call that a “tax” or not is purely a terminological question. It used to be that this was only required for owning a TV, but this was hard to enforce because there was no automatic legal requirement to let inspectors into one’s home and companies started to produce TVs without a TV tuner (i.e. could only stream from the Internet) to get around this.
It’s not a tax tho? At least not in Germany. It’s going directly to the state-broadcasting service but unconditionally; the idea being it’s harder to influence the content or threaten them with cutting off their funding.
This is also the case in Austria according to https://orf.beitrag.at/faq/allgemein so whether to call that a “tax” or not is purely a terminological question. It used to be that this was only required for owning a TV, but this was hard to enforce because there was no automatic legal requirement to let inspectors into one’s home and companies started to produce TVs without a TV tuner (i.e. could only stream from the Internet) to get around this.