Now this one here of course is required since TV and radio broadcasting over the Internet (IPTV) or onto a mobile (radio or mobile TV) is a -relatively- new media. Everybody who is not already paying a fee for radio/TV will have to now pay about 5 EUR per month if they have a PC with Internet access or a mobile TV, radio capable phone.

What was striking me today is the fact that in Heise Online, see here, nearly 1'000 people added their comments in its dicussion forum and practically all of them negative.

Not sure where this "everything has to be for free" mentality in Germany is coming from, but it is a dangerous development in my opinion. I am observing this phenomeon for quite some time now when dealing with Germans and German companies. The last 10-12 years have been -economically- overall tough for them and that lead to a culture where pricing got ruined and many are trying to move from one "clever" freebee to the next. eBay e.g. is hugely successful in Germany because it fits into this mentality of course excellent since it provides a tool to get things cheap or to sell things to a wide audience quickly and with low cost. Now at the same time Germany is developing into a society where 10% in the west and 20% in the east have practically no disposable income.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, because what is developing here is a vicious circle that is hurting the whole country. If a society is not willing to pay for services or hardly pay for them then of course this takes out interest in investing into new technologies on the one side and kills many potential service jobs on the other side. The source of the problem is the same for both. How this can be resolved I don't know, but the overall threat is that Germany will further loose attractiveness to do business with and fall behind other European countries that 10 years ago would not even have been on the radar screen such as Austria or Spain e.g.