On Television and Taxes

*Nick in Vienna

I, like many people in America and Austria, have been watching quite a bit of the winter olympics this past week. The Austrians really like the winter olympics because it seems like everyone here loves to ski and skate. The public school system here takes a "ski week" where everybody takes off of school to go skiing. Seriously, I'm not kidding about this. While Americas are fretting over test scores and trying to add more hours to the school day, Austrians are saying, screw it, let's just all go skiing this week. Mind you, they still take religious holidays (far more than in the US) so this is just an extra week off.

Anyway, this post is about television in Austria and Europe in general. I've got cable here at my apartment and I watch a fair amount to practice my german. The primary difference is there are way, way less commercials. I first really noticed this during the Super Bowl a few weeks ago which was picked up by a local cable channel. During the game, which as far as I am concerned is a 5 hour commercial sometimes interrupted by a football game few people care about (I'm a baseball fan first, you see) they took very, very few commercial breaks. This was really odd. They were using the American feed, so it was very easy to tell when the Americans had cut to commercials, such as after punts, timeouts, injuries, etc. The Austrians rarely went to commercial, but instead played highlights of the game or talked about football in general. They only took a commercial break between quarters and at halftime. As another example, yesterday I was watching a replay of an olympic hockey game. Since it wasn't live they could do whatever they wanted (the games was originally played at about 4 am European time). What they did was never take a commercial. Not even between periods. As soon as one ended they just started the next.

But how do the television stations make money, you may be asking. In Austria and France, and probably in other countries but I don't know, they have a "TV tax." If you own a television set you pay a tax on it. That money is used to subsidize the stations (several of which are run by the government) so they can run programming without commercials ever 8-10 minutes (and if I had to guess are forced by law to not run too many commercials).

I'm of mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, TV watching is far more enjoyable and it does seem like Austrians are less materialistic (subjective, I know). We don't have kids yet, but I can imagine it is a pain if your kid sees 100 toy commercials a day. Here that doesn't happen.

On the other hand, the TV tax is very weird. I, as with many americans, believe that information should be freely available to citizens for a democracy to properly function. There is also a radio tax here, meaning that for a person to have a device that allows them to get local and national news, they have to pay a tax for it (I don't know how much the tax is, but I think it is around 250 euros a year for tv). Most Americans pay far more than that per year if they have cable or digital cable, but there are many who can't afford cable and their primary source of information is the local evening news.