They are planning to develop new tech which they might open source. But all this still has to be approved by the regulator and the government.
That said, I have seen some of the tech from the inside ~10 years ago. The ARD player was developed by a third party and there was no budget to bring this in house. Things might have changed but redoing everything just to open source it sounds like a waste of money.
The rest of the system wasn't very interesting back in the day, just an off-the-shelf CMS and internal feeds to pull in all the content from the different channels automatically.
Here is an old interview with the technical directors from back then explaining some of the internals: https://tech.ebu.ch/docs/techreview/trev_2010-Q1_Mediathek.p...
The sites have changed quite a lot since then and they have added subscription content as well. Maybe they now have code which would be more interesting to open source.
The key difference is that taxes are completely under discretion of parliamentary control, whereas the Rundfunkbeitrag is under discretion of the individual broadcast authority governance boards (which are too closely tied to politicians for my comfort, but that's another thing).
Duty. (like stamp duty)
Fee.
Licence/License. (maybe like the BBC licence fee?)
Levy. (see below)
There is also the concept of the hypothicated tax. The only exemplar I know is the Australian Medicare levy, the money is solely to be used, and spent on Medicare, and no other purpose enshrined in law. People often claim petrol tax was designed to pay for roads infrastructure but it wasn't legally bound, and is not a hypothicated tax. Nor is the ULEZ and like costs to drive in the inner city with a petrol engine. They are designed to discourage use of ICE not to pay for them.
https://www.heise.de/news/BGH-Urteil-Staatlicher-Wetterdiens...
"ARD and ZDF want to offer their streaming code as open source"
EDIT: Looks like it is only broken for me in FireFox...
They've since changed their tune and ceased uploading whole episodes, only excerpts go onto YouTube now with links to their own "Mediathek".
From my understanding they're doing so because the content is paid for by public money, and YouTube is a foreign for-profit company. So they were essentially spending the citizens money to provide content to a private entity that's headquartered abroad
That's one thing, but IIRC the larger part was that the private broadcasters whined as they always do.
They did upload there, but fortunately it was available elsewhere too.
While a two-stream recommendation loop is quite common in both systems, the loop above only happened twice for me so far. Still, it might just perfectly highlight the lack of passion and user focus plaguing their current platforms.
So, whatever they come up with in the new and maybe open one... ah, who am I kidding.
If you stream via Chromecast, you can see your connection getting dropped by adaptive bitrate streaming in realtime.
It's always low quality, medium quality, high quality, ultra high quality, lag, then low quality again. You cannot change it to a fixed level manually too, on the Chromecast.
use of an adblocker is universally advised though
ca. 2003, I'm getting rid of my tv-card which has been free until now, or else I have to pay a fee...
ca. 2010, They've got a website now, if you have a computer or phone, you gotta pay the fee...
great... now I have to pay the fee because I have a github... or what
ca. 2015, you have to pay it anyway, with no exemptions
ca. 2020, they start randomly sending out delay penalties, even if you are late by days, without ever notifying you of the due dates
ca. 2022, they sneakily shift the 3-months fee forward, first you can pay it at the end of the period, then in the middle month, then soon at the beginning
meanwhile, the programming gets worse and worse every year. Then they get surprised if people vote for parties which promise to abolish it.
